Basic Instinct 2: Critic Reviews

Basic Instinct 2 isn't bad, exactly, but it lacks the entertaining vulgarity of the first film.

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.

Poor Sharon Stone. She's still big; it's the erotic thrillers that got small.

The 1992 phenomenon was creepy, tense and sexually charged in a bold yet tawdry way. This sequel lacks even a shred of those elements.

Where is the suspense part? There is no suspense part. Suspense demands clarity of motive and action, and this screenplay never provides it.

Absurdly overheated and unforgivably dull, Basic Instinct 2 is the accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

The plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging Usual Suspects twist).

As with the first film, BI2 abounds with red herrings and misdirection, and comes up with an equally ambiguous Did she or didn't she? ending. But there are problems here beyond its staleness.

Using the same basic plot as 1992's original, BI2 feels less like a sequel than a remake whose shelf life has expired.

But most of the conversation in the lobby will revolve around who designed SS's clothes and jewelry. That's the way Ms. Stone wants it, and that's the way it is.

Basic Instinct 2 seems aimed at two audiences: men in raincoats in dark theaters and graduate students in film studies.

Stupefyingly lackluster.

Here is a movie so outrageous and preposterous it is either (a) suicidal or (b) throbbing with a horrible fascination. I lean toward (b).

In Basic Instinct 2 the manufactured thrill is gone.

Like many sequels this is actually a remake, and it suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

Basic Instinct 2 is as dull as a blunt ice pick, watering down the original film's knockout cocktail of kinky sex and bloody murder into a timid, tepid thriller.

In the end, this is a movie that makes the original Basic Instinct look good. And in a way, that's quite a feat.

Trust your basic instinct and avoid the worst sequel since Staying Alive.

Those hoping for either a sizzling -- or an unintentionally hilarious -- good time will be disappointed by this inexplicably dull sequel.

At this point, there are inflatable toys that are livelier than Stone, but how can you tell the difference? Basic Instinct 2 is not an erotic thriller. It's taxidermy.

But the movie is a baroque little mystery of so little mystery or consequence that you're literally sitting there waiting for the next full body cavity search.

Even the ice pick looks like it really doesn't want to be there.

The original movie lacked sense, but it did possess that sizzle. This one has neither.

If you're trying to reinvigorate the art of the stylish thriller, the movie you come up with needs to be stylish and it needs to be thrilling. Basic Instinct 2, written by Leora Barish and Henry Bean and directed by Michael Caton-Jones, is neither.