Sharon Stone is addicted to risk

It should come as no surprise that Basic Instinct 2, the long-gestating follow-up to Paul Verhoeven's 1992 blip on the zeitgeist screen, is a disaster of the highest or perhaps lowest order. It is also no surprise that this joyless calculation, which was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and possesses neither the first film's sleek wit nor its madness, is such a prime object lesson in the degradation that can face Hollywood actresses, espe-cially those over 40. Acting always involves a degree of self-abasement, but just watching trash like this is degrading.

Once again, Sharon Stone stars as Catherine Tramell, a mass-market crime novelist with a psyche as overheated as her prose style. Jacqueline Susann by way of Jeffrey Dahmer, Catherine the Not-So-Great has something of a black-widow complex, to judge by the body count she seemed to leave in her wake in the original flick.

Old habits die hard, especially in genre films. And so Basic Instinct 2 opens with Tramell racing through a sleek cubist cityscape that looks like the usual futurist fantasy but is really just dirty old London after hours. With her hunk du jour drooling in the passenger seat, she flexes her ambidexterity by manically shifting gears while simultaneously pleasuring herself. Mission accomplished, she promptly sails off the road and into the Thames, sinking the car.

This enjoyably sleazy opening soon proves, much like Tramell herself, to be a cruel tease. As written by Leora Barish and Henry Bean, Basic Instinct 2 turns out to be nothing more than a police procedural freighted with some solid acting talent (David Morrissey, Charlotte Rampling, David Thewlis) and tricked out with a little kink (garrotes, handcuffs and chains, oh my). In between the bullets and heavy breathing, the screenwriters have wedged in some high-brow allusions that suggest either acute desperation or extreme pretension. Certainly this has to be the only film from those reliable schlockmeisters Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna to feature the word Lacanian.

Namedropping an abstruse school of psychoanalytic theory probably seemed terribly clever at one point; given this film, however, it's grounds for screenwriting hell. The conceit of a beautiful woman who kills her lovers by lethally jabbing them with an ice pick helped turn Basic Instinct into a hot-button success (no panties helped). At once seductively female and fatally male, an outsize vagina dentata and a freakily phallic woman, the original Tramell was an elaboration on the sex-equals-death fantasy spun the previous decade in Fatal Attraction. Like Glenn Close's bunny-boiler, she embodied both sexual panic and a welter of fears about female power. And just like her bad sister, just like every bad girl who takes temporary control of the screen, she seemed primed to get hers.

The problem is, Tramell didn't die. Fatal Attraction ends with the aggrieved wife shooting her home-wrecking rival. Tramell arguably faced a worse end in Basic Instinct: after running entertainingly amok, with the agreeably game Stone stealing her every scene, the character wound up in bed with Michael Douglas's detective. As bad as that sounds, nothing compares to the fate that awaited Stone simply by growing older -- older at least in Hollywood years. Now 48, the actress retains the same lucid gaze and whippet-thin body, but in this film her face looks strangely inert, and she seems deeply ill at ease. Stone has famously denied having plastic surgery, and maybe that's true, but, man, does she look weird here.