Basic Instinct (1992) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp (C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Dumb dud of an entry in the BODY HEAT sweepstakes, and now something of a landmark for having spawned a jillion clones.
BASIC INSTINCT's worst crime is that it's not just a bad movie, but in many ways, an incompetent one as well. It's stupid in itself, and stupid to think its audience is as stupid as it is. It's supposed to be a thriller, but the plot is dead on its feet, and ultimately arbitrary; it's only put into the movie to jerk us around. It's also supposed to be sexy, but it's instead got the unpleasant rawness of a teenager showing younger kids his collections of dirty pictures. It's a ripoff.
The story opens with a rock star being murdered while in the throes of orgasm. The biggest suspect is an authoress, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), who wrote a novel in which the murder was eerily presaged. Or maybe it's the work of a copycat? These and other plot threads get fed to the detective who's on the case (Michael Douglas), who has a few problems himself. Like we wonder if his elevator goes to the top floor. We can measure with a stopwatch the time from them setting eyes on each other to the moment they are doing the mattress dance.
Joe Eszterhas has written the screenplay, and he uses a device that he used before in the much better JAGGED EDGE: the killer's identity is kept a secret until the movie's final shot. This isn't in itself a problem -- the problem is that up until that point, we've been given nothing to work with. Every clue in the movie -- EVERY clue -- is ambiguous. The whole thriller aspect of the movie is a shill.
Red herrings, dead plot threads, violence, and kinky sexuality litter the movie like potholes in Manhattan streets. They add up to zip, because they're not happening to people we care about. Douglas's character is foulmouthed and bitter and that's it; Stone's character has an iron-on smile that never changes; the rest are forgettable. When we don't even have the luxury of giving a damn about anyone in the movie, who cares what happens in it? Especially with an ending that is not only unsatisfying, but in many ways inexplicable? (A friend of mine once came up with a rule of thumb about movie characters: "If no one in the movie behaves like anyone you know, or would *care* to know, JUST LEAVE!")
One of the nastier things about the movie is the way it treats lesbianism not as an integral part of someone's life, but as a kind of kink -- something to thrill men with. I despair whenever I encounter this kind of stupidity in mainstream entertainment; are we still so culturally Neanderthal that the only way to include something like that in a big-budget Hollywood film is as a Hefnerism?
One out of four icepicks.
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