Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Not to state the obvious, but sex has, and always will, sell. Marketing any movie on the back of its salacious content and titillation factor is usually a solid way to guarantee at least a decent opening weekend. Unless, of course, it’s crap, and critics like Roger Ebert burn it to the ground.
The mainstream erotic thriller arguably reached its cinematic peak in the early 1990s, but there can always be too much of a good thing. Some of them became classics and others attained cult status, but when too many of them were critical and commercial catastrophes, the short-lived craze ultimately flopped out.
At the forefront of the movement was Sharon Stone, who headlined Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, which rode a wave of on and offscreen controversy to over $350million at the box office and gave rise to several scenes that punctured the pop culture consciousness. However, when the actor sought to repeat the trick the very next year in Sliver, it notched seven Razzie nominations.
It still made money for reasons that should be clear to anyone, and it was Stone’s last appearance in the genre for almost a decade and a half. Talk had constantly bubbled away in the background about the star potentially reprising the role of Catherine Tramell, and when she did, Michael Caton-Jones’ Basic Instinct 2 was nothing short of woeful.
Any movie that begins with Stan Collymore being murdered while getting frisky behind the wheel of a car is guaranteed to provide plenty of unintentional comedy value, which the film did at least have in spades. Stone’s performance won her a ‘Worst Actress’ Razzie in a flick that also claimed ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Screenplay’, and ‘Worst Prequel or Sequel’, so it’s no surprise that Ebert wasn’t impressed.
“I cannot recommend the movie, but… why the hell can’t I?” he pondered in a dreary review. “Just because it’s godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? Godawful and boring, that would be a reason.” It’s never a good sign to start things off with the most backhanded of compliments, but that was only the first of many.
“The Catherine Tramell role cannot be played well,” Ebert reasoned. “But Sharon Stone can play it badly better than any other actress alive.” He even criticised one of Basic Instinct 2‘s main selling points, explaining that “the much-advertised full frontal nudity” doesn’t conspire “to be full, frontal, and nude all at the same time.”
Nobody was expecting it to be a masterpiece, but when of the only semi-kind things one of the most famous critics in the business can say about the film is that it “is not good in any rational or defensible way, but not bad in irrational and indefensible ways,” it became pretty clear that beyond Stone returning to the most famous, or infamous, character of her career, there was no genuine reason for it to exist.
Basic Instinct 2 missed the boat for striking while the iron was hot by at least ten years, and in the end, it achieved absolutely nothing other than sinking without a trace in cinemas, losing a fortune for the studio, and taking pride of place as one of Stone’s worst-reviewed movies.
