Basic Instinct 2 opens 'œwith a bang,' said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Novelist Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone, and her latest conquest are playing erotic games while speeding along a London roadway. With her hands in places they shouldn't be, Tramell drives the car into the Thames. Alas, 'œthat may be the last moment of unbridled joy' in the film. Tramell survives, her lover doesn't. The courts send her to shrink Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey) to evaluate her sanity. Naturally, she reduces him to a puddle of lust, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. But the movie is fatally British. When it 'œtries to get down and dirty, it just seizes up.' Director Michael Caton-Jones seems more interested in architecture than in people, as is evidenced by the overabundance of shots of the phallic Swiss Re building in London. Caton-Jones also fails to make sense of the plot, which ends with an unconvincing Big Twist. Don't blame Stone, said Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She looks fabulous, and is every bit as wickedly alluring as she was 15 years go. But 'œeven Meryl Streep would have trouble playing off Morrissey,' who is too blandly asexual to deserve her attentions.
Rating: R
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