THE MOVIE: Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction THE DIRECTOR: Michael Caton-Jones THE STARS: Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling At times during the prepensely unintelligible “Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction,” I became so disoriented that I closed my eyes and imagined being in a “happy place.” Funny thing is, in those moments of forced reverie, the soothing image conjured was one from the infamous interrogation scene of the far-superior original film, a worldwide phenomenon 14 years ago. Hey, you have your happy places, I’ve got mine.
Reprising the role that made her the most-talked-about blonde bombshell of 1992, a still-sultry Sharon Stone chews up and spits out every scene she’s in as renascent Ice-pick Queen Catherine Tramell. Who can blame her? “Risk Addiction,” while not nearly as stomach turning as some predicted, is hard to swallow. The dialogue is the sort of purple pap you might get from Joe Eszterhas (the scribe behind “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls”) if you fed him ecstasy and locked him away for a month with a typewriter in a sex shop video booth. Following the plot is like watching agitated monkeys try to tie an anchor hitch. Still, Stone provides enough guilty pleasures, director Michael Caton-Jones and scripters Leora Barish and Henry Bean enough unintentional hilarity, to — perhaps — keep this off of many of the year’s “Worst of” lists.
Catherine’s crafty, and she gets around — having abandoned her San Francisco beach house for a lair of steel and shadows in the heart of production designer Norman Garwood’s radically stylized rendering of London. Pic opens with Catherine racing through the streets in a sportscar while receiving a helping hand, if you will, from a stud that turns out to be a famous British soccer player. He also turns out to be dead after the car plunges into the Thames River. Catherine escapes, and once again finds herself on the wrong side of the law. David Morrissey plays Dr. Michael Glass, the celebrated shrink brought in to evaluate the mysterious seductress. Glass exudes cool professionalism for about a minute, but Catherine’s ever-present cigarette smoke gets in his eyes, and it isn’t long before nut doctor goes nuts over his patient … and we all know how badly an obsession with Ms. Tramell ended for Michael Douglas. (RATED R. RUNNING TIME: 114 MINUTES)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 31, 2006. Read the original PDF.