Bad to the bone

Some things are just so bad, you have to bear witness to them yourself.
This explains why I schlepped to a dark and lonely cinema the other night to watch Basic Instinct 2. I had to see what a movie conceivably worse than Showgirls would look like.

Basic Instinct 2 is not "good" bad, it’s not "fun" bad, it’s not iconically bad like Showgirls or transcendentally bad like Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.

No, it’s just a shite sandwich. To go.

Set in merry old England, it follows the continuing exploits of crime novelist Catherine Tramell, who was least seen cavorting with Michael Douglas’s character Nick (colorfully nicknamed "Shooter") in Basic Instinct. Whatever happened to Nick? We never find out. Presumably he got married to someone more sensible and sedate and learned to steer clear of Grade Z projects like Basic Instinct 2.

Catherine is first glimpsed driving an Alfa Romeo Spider really fast through London’s deserted early-morning streets. One hand steers while the other hand pleasures herself. A male flunky sits next to her, too drugged out to care. She makes pinpoint turns while keeping up her right-hand rhythm. How she is able to give herself an orgasm and corner the Spider at 110 mph is an engineering feat in itself. The car plunges into the Thames and Catherine swims away, dumping her incapacitated boyfriend.

A promising opening, but we are soon on to bigger and badder things. A clear indication of how bad Catherine is: she smokes in nearly every scene, even in places where smoking is not permitted! We know that smoke is usually a symbol of Mephistopheles’ presence in literature, but this ain’t literature. Instead, Catherine’s chain-smoking seems to hark back to less enlightened times, particularly 1992, when the original Basic Instinct came out. At that time, techno music, lesbianism and woman-on-top banter was kind of fresh and, in the hands of freaky screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, kind of fun.

Nothing in Basic Instinct 2 is very much fun, though Stone, at 48, seems to be enjoying herself, apparently under the illusion that she’s in a Grade A production. The absence of big names in the mostly British cast (and the presence of a lot of doughy, odd-shaped faces that bring us briefly back to the Tolkien Shire) means that Stone is, amazingly, the most interesting thing to watch here. She sneers her way through the role, not even bothering to inject any shading into her black widow character as she did in the original.

"Inject" is an apt word. I sat through Basic Instinct 2 with my wife and a dermatologist who pronounced that Stone – who has famously denied getting plastic surgery – had most likely received "two units of Botox" right between the eyebrows. The better to stare stonily at the camera, I suppose.

Catherine is called in for questioning by the London police after her midnight swim, of course, and they are, as usual, too stupid to pin anything on her besides a speeding ticket. Detective Roy Washburn (David Thewlis, giving it the old Oxford try) is so exasperated by Catherine’s duplicitous nature that he screams at one point: "She’s a genius at the art of mind-f***ing!"

Thewlis has some of the best lines by a mile, by the way. He tries to convince psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey, a poor man’s Liam Neeson) that Catherine just might be, well, a homicidal maniac after the good doctor takes her on as a patient. Morrissey is apparently too smitten with her charms to think straight, though. As she straddles a chair in his office, asking Dr. Glass what kind of sexual fantasies he has about her, he just gazes back with a bovine stare, too undone to even blush.

Glass, you see, has an ex-wife who is dating a sleazy magazine journalist who wants to spill all about an infamous case in which the dumb doctor failed to stop a previous dangerous patient from killing again. Could history be repeating itself in the psychosexual vortex that is Basic Instinct 2?

When the sleazy journalist ends up strangled dead with a leather belt (shades of Michael Hutchence), Dr. Dumbass arrives to comfort the ex-wife and ends up handling key evidence. (CSI would have a field day on this set, where the London police habitually botch, tamper with and fudge evidence.) A few days later, he confronts his ex-wife in a pub about what the sleazy journalist was going to write about him. She starts crying, saying she’s late to meet another friend at another bar, and too upset to talk about it. Yes, she’s so broken up over her sleazy journalist boyfriend’s death that she can barely bar-hop!

Of course, the ex-wife meets up with Catherine at a bar and soon gets her throat slit. Fortunately, Dr. Clueless arrives seconds later to put his hands around her throat and generally contaminate the evidence.

Now Detective Washburn is really determined to "nail" Catherine, and, as the bodies pile up, the veteran novelist starts spinning her own web of mind games about Washburn’s past. Glass can’t see through the fog of stealthy lies and, though he nearly strangles Catherine in a hot tub (the better to display Stone’s unnatural endowments, for old time’s sake), he leaves again, impotent, with a copy of her latest novel on CD.

Reading the purple prose within convinces him that a colleague (Charlotte Rampling, trying to keep her nose above the sleazery) might be in danger. He arrives to find that the masterful Catherine has spun yet another web of intricate lies to becloud and befog the usually clear-thinking Rampling, who now believes Glass is the homicidal one. Somehow, a gun appears. Glass is eager to kill Catherine, but for some strange reason, he is taken in once again by her Scheherazade-like skills, and becomes convinced that Washburn is the real killer.

Washburn barges in just in time to take two slugs in the chest from Dr. Glass. "Whatever she tells you… it’s all lies!" he croaks before slumping dead to the floor.

Truly, Catherine is a spinner of deceit par excellence, and as Glass is sent away to an institution (found not guilty of killing Washburn by reason of insanity), she visits him once again, plopping a copy of her new novel (The Analyst) on his lap and taunting him mercilessly. He can’t even summon the will to throw the damn book at her head as she walks away, smirking and scot-free, yet again. Does this self-satisfied smirk mean that Stone intends to grace the screen in another 15 years, say for Geriatric Instinct 3, when she’s about 65? Don’t put it past her. You know what a master weaver of spellbinding deceit she is.

Those expecting sleazy sex in Basic Instinct 2 might find the thrills a little pedestrian. Besides anal intercourse (the good Dr. Glass sodomizing a Catherine-surrogate while gazing across the room at her dust-cover photo, which is, tellingly, about 20 years old), there’s only an ugly orgy scene to keep the diehards in their seats. Amazingly, our cinema was about half-full (or half-empty, depending on your outlook) and the film is running a second smash week in Manila. In the US, however, patrons have been less receptive, and the film made only $3 million on opening weekend (right below Disney’s The Shaggy Dog. Boy, I didn’t think movies got out of bed for less than $10 million these days) and leading Conan O’Brien to quip that Sharon was so demoralized by the poor box office that she was now "too embarrassed to show her vagina in public."

Hey, maybe Conan should’ve written the script instead.