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Sharon Stone is addicted to risk

By Manohla Dargis
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Friday, Apr 07, 2006, Page 16

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.

Film Notes: Basic Instinct 2 Directed by: Michael Caton-Jones Starring: Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell), David Morrissey (Dr. Michael Glass), Charlotte Rampling (Dr. Milena Gardosh), David Thewlis (Detective Superintendent Roy Washburn), Hugh Dancy (Adam Towers) Running time: 113 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

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.

It's part of an actor's job to change appearances. And it has long been part of the star's job to undergo a little surgical correction, a nip here, a tuck there. That said, and Stone notwithstanding, the mania for increasingly youthful-looking faces seems fundamentally different from the old-fashioned ruse in which the Broadway actress temporarily pulls her loose skin back with some tape. For one thing, the tape comes off. For another, unlike the film actor, the stage performer doesn't have to navigate the close-ups that inevi-tably betray every secret, no matter how artfully hidden.

The last few decades have been calamitous for American film actresses (of any age), who have been increasingly marginalized by the very industry they helped build. It would be wrong to put all the blame for Stone's appearance and performance in Basic Instinct 2 on the industry; greed and vanity surely played a part, as did behind-the-scenes wrangling. To judge by the unflattering lighting and camera angles, Caton-Jones had no particular love for his star. He wasn't about to save her from herself and indeed seems to have decided that the best way into or maybe around the material was to divide it into two films: one, a fairly somnolent procedural with British actors; the other, a hysterically pitched Hollywood star vehicle.

For amusement's sake, it is possible to read Basic Instinct 2 as a metaphor for contemporary American-British political relations (a psychotic Yank lures a decent Brit into a web of deceit and murder), but this is a poor reward for two hours of drift and sludge. The camp pleasures fleetingly promised by the crazy opener and the first few minutes of Stone's vamping soon give way to boredom and time to contemplate, yet once more, just how brutal it is to be an actress in Hollywood. Last year, Stone delivered a gem of a performance in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, reconfirming that her work in films like Casino was not an aberration. She was luminous and touching in Jarmusch's film partly because the role called for her to act her age, and she happily complied.
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