Basic Instinct 2 feels like a remake of the first, minus the tension and entertainment. The story? Female novelist is involved in a fatal car crash, driving at many times the speed limit into a river while on drugs, and killing her lover for the day in the process. Said lover was supposedly a football star, but that fact is forgotten two minutes into the film and never mentioned again. The rest of the film deals with her cat and mouse relationship with a psychiatrist who evaluates her, and eventually is hired by herself for treatment.
The problem with Basic Instinct - apart from painfully lacking a charismatic male lead - is that it's too obvious. Whenever the two characters are in a room, the dialogue spoken has no spark, no originality, no surprise. It's an exercise of putting the most obvious possible lines of dialogue into the mouths of two cardboard characters. I had never seen the film before and mouthed the dialogue with surprising accuracy. That ruins any potential of chemistry developing between the leads.
Bland dialogue is only the start, as the film struggles badly to build up suspense. In the original, you were never quite sure about Sharon Stone's character. In this one, she's obviously a psychopath right from the start. We see the psychiatrist thrown into doubt this way and that, but the audience never for a moment thinks she is anything but a psychopathic murderess. And the psychiatrist's first evaluation of her means we never feel compassion for him when he falls into her web, as he really should have seen it coming.
All of this is only made worse by plot holes (if you kill someone by dangerous driving in the UK, you go to prison - whether it was premeditated murder or not) and a B-movie feel. The most pathetic moment arrives when the psychiatrist is given a phone number to contact a detective from San Francisco. There is some build up, and the audience half expects to hear Michael Douglas on the other line. Instead, we never hear the conversation at all. It feels like they scripted it, but could not get the original actors to sign on to do even a voice-over because they disliked the script so much.
Basic Instinct 2 should have been a direct to video B-movie sequel, based on the quality of the script and the cast and cinematography. That it ended up in cinemas must have been a misjudgement on behalf of the producers - it definitely isn't engaging enough to be anything more than a mediocre made for TV film.
The problem with Basic Instinct - apart from painfully lacking a charismatic male lead - is that it's too obvious. Whenever the two characters are in a room, the dialogue spoken has no spark, no originality, no surprise. It's an exercise of putting the most obvious possible lines of dialogue into the mouths of two cardboard characters. I had never seen the film before and mouthed the dialogue with surprising accuracy. That ruins any potential of chemistry developing between the leads.
Bland dialogue is only the start, as the film struggles badly to build up suspense. In the original, you were never quite sure about Sharon Stone's character. In this one, she's obviously a psychopath right from the start. We see the psychiatrist thrown into doubt this way and that, but the audience never for a moment thinks she is anything but a psychopathic murderess. And the psychiatrist's first evaluation of her means we never feel compassion for him when he falls into her web, as he really should have seen it coming.
All of this is only made worse by plot holes (if you kill someone by dangerous driving in the UK, you go to prison - whether it was premeditated murder or not) and a B-movie feel. The most pathetic moment arrives when the psychiatrist is given a phone number to contact a detective from San Francisco. There is some build up, and the audience half expects to hear Michael Douglas on the other line. Instead, we never hear the conversation at all. It feels like they scripted it, but could not get the original actors to sign on to do even a voice-over because they disliked the script so much.
Basic Instinct 2 should have been a direct to video B-movie sequel, based on the quality of the script and the cast and cinematography. That it ended up in cinemas must have been a misjudgement on behalf of the producers - it definitely isn't engaging enough to be anything more than a mediocre made for TV film.