Well, it's also been a long time since the original Basic Instinct, a comedy I greatly enjoy, and sometimes you have to shoot the fish in the barrel, because there's just so many fish:
Guardian UK: It is difficult to convey just how uproariously awful this movie is, all of the time. The original's complications had their own messy allure: this one is just muddled and silly. Sharon is haughtily jaded; there is nothing in the script to release her natural fizz; where once there was danger and mischief, there is now only a kind of dyspepsia, and the script by Leora Barish and Henry Bean gives no perspective on what Catherine might be like as an older woman.
Arizona Republic: [T]he entire film is hollow. It also commits the grave sin of psychological thrillers: heavy on psychology, light on thrills. Basic Instinct had a twisting plot that kept viewers guessing. The only thing you'll be guessing about here is why you spent $9 to see this. Even the sex scenes, obviously designed to shock, are merely gratuitous nods to the original. Nothing in Basic Instinct 2 works, unless you're seeing Stone with her clothes off. Trust your basic instinct and avoid the worst sequel since Staying Alive.
LA Times: With "Basic Instinct 2," the "Basic Instinct" franchise (who saw it coming?) enters its unhinged rococo phase. Set in a carefully curated London, abstracted and glamorized to a fare-thee-well, the new movie makes the original Verhoeven-Eszterhas collaboration look positively Hellenic. It's just that fancy. Every surface is buffed, shiny, unbelievably expensive — including Sharon Stone herself, who, should the situation arise, could double as her own limited edition action figure. . . . Watching Stone slink along with a diabolical smirk frozen on her face, trailing bodies and clichés, is not, however, without its pleasures. What we may very well be looking at here is another "Showgirls," a drag camp-fest for the "Baby Jane" crowd, fabulous fodder for future cabaret acts, and a pleasure probably best enjoyed in a crowd — preferably a vocal one. Dead serious and stone idiotic, the only basic instinct in evidence here is desperation.
San Jose Mercury News: Her new playmate is a perpetual "duh'" short of being Michael Douglas, star of the original picture and an actor whose sexual charge is sorely missed here. Caught in Tramell's web, Glass' fly is open to the operatic mind game she has in store for him. But in the clammy hands of a Liam Neeson knockoff named David Morrissey, he has the irradiated sexuality of a potato.
NYT: Certainly this has to be the only film from those reliable schlockmeisters Mario F. Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna — Mr. Kassar brought us the original Basic Instinct, and together they had a hand in much of Sylvester Stallone's well-oiled oeuvre — to feature the word Lacanian.
Namedropping an abstruse school of psychoanalytic theory probably seemed terribly clever at one point; given this film, however, it's grounds for screenwriting hell.Ebert: I cannot recommend the movie, but ... why the hell can't I? Just because it's godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? . . . The Catherine Tramell role cannot be played well, but Sharon Stone can play it badly better than any other actress alive. The director, Michael Caton-Jones, alternates smoldering closeups with towering dominatrix poses, and there's an extended Jacuzzi sequence in which we get the much-advertised full frontal nudity -- which does not, somehow, manage to be full, frontal and nude all at the same time. First a little nude, then a little full, then a little frontal, driving us crazy trying to load her simultaneously onto our hard drive. . . . "Basic Instinct 2" is not good in any rational or defensible way, but not bad in irrational and indefensible ways.
In the words of critic Jay Sherman, "It in-stinks!" Let us know if you find more.
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