Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

Basic Instinct 2 arrives fourteen years after its predecessor, a poisoned chalice that passed through several hands before landing with Michael Caton-Jones, who has since described taking the job because he was broke. Catherine Tramell relocates to London, where Scotland Yard hands her to a psychiatrist named Glass and the machinery of seduction and murder grinds forward on schedule. The result is lurid, slack, and oddly joyless. Sharon Stone plays the role with the commitment of a woman who sued for the privilege, and Roger Ebert's assessment that she plays it badly better than anyone alive remains the kindest thing said about the enterprise.

On the social consciousness ledger, the film is nearly blank. Tramell's bisexuality surfaces in an affair with the character Denise, folded into the erotic apparatus with no identity claim attached. Psychiatry supplies the plot's vocabulary, narcissism and institutionalization treated as thriller furniture instead of any statement about neurodivergent lives. Indira Varma and Stan Collymore appear in supporting parts, and the film draws no attention to their presence and no meaning from it. Climate concerns, class resentment, body politics, historical revision: absent. The screenplay luxuriates in affluence without noticing it, which is not a critique of wealth but an advertisement for it.

There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moral instruction of any kind. The gender politics are regressive by design, Tramell a predatory seductress the camera adores. Four Golden Raspberry Awards followed, including Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay, and a third installment was quietly abandoned. We file it under genre exercise, dated 2006, and return to our work.