Risky business

Our rating:

It was always going to be a big ask to top Basic Instinct, that sleazy violent celebration of drug-induced sex and violence, but director Michael Caton-Jones has tried to rise to the task and for the most part has failed dismally. That’s not to say Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction (sounds like a cologne racing car drivers would wear) isn’t fun in its own way but this time around it feels like there’s something missing. It’s not Joe Eszterhas’ saucy script or Michael Douglas’ floppy rear, no, it’s that darkness, that sharp violence, it’s the unknown.

This time Catherine Trammel (Sharon Stone) is living in London and when we first meet her she’s high as a kite and driving her car real fast with a male passenger who seems half dead but not too far gone to, shall we say, service the driver. This leads to an accident which results in him dying and her miraculously (a word I’m going to use a lot today) swimming away. Curiously the London police, led by David Thewlis, decide she needs therapy and she’s borne aloft to the offices of Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey) at whom she immediately makes the first of many passes with purring statements such as “Is this where we’re gonna do it?”

With a wardrobe as expansive as Joan Collins’ and an almost Joan Crawford-like way of announcing her lines rather than just saying them, Stone is hilarious as Catherine; her exits are as grand as can be and I kept hoping she’d trip. It is of course her miraculous luck that she landed herself the dumbest psychiatrist in London who seems to possess only one facial expression but as we all know, Catherine does her research thoroughly; I reckon she even knows when her subjects have a bowel movement. Miraculously, Charlotte Rampling is in here too as a colleague of Michael’s but her only purpose is to warn her friend he’s playing with fire which she obviously says into his deaf ear.

As students of the first instalment will remember, no-one is smarter than Catherine (or more beautiful) and she still has that miraculous talent of knowing exactly when and where people will appear at any given time. As before, she’s writing another book (this one’s called Tales of My Undies) and everyone around her seems to be a character for her tome. Even a sleazy tabloid reporter manages to knock boots with our heroine, but as we all know Catherine has a foolproof way of avoiding that morning-after awkwardness; did I mention she still owns that icepick? From what we see she even likes to get knocked around a bit but as I’m sure you can guess when our girl says No, she damn well means it.

The problem many may have is the ending which attempts to question everything that’s gone before. It throws open the pretentious but utterly implausible notion that maybe Catherine isn’t the nymphomaniacal, devious psychopath we’ve all grown to know and love. For dissenters, check out that Cheshire cat grin she says goodbye with. It tells you everything you need to know. Until next time.

Michael Dalton

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Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction

Director: Michael Caton-Jones
Cast: Sharon Stone, David Morrissey David Thewlis and Charlotte Rampling
Release: Nationally on 30 March 2006
Rated: MA15+