Review of Basic Instinct 2 (2006) by Ola G — 09 Aug 2008

A recipient of much critical derision, Basic Instinct 2 is actually one of the best mainstream films of recent years. It's not as good as the original, but it does many intriguing and provocative things with the character of Catherine Trammell, portrayed in a performance of virtuoso cheek by Sharon Stone, the most underused actress in Hollywood.

The plot echoes and extends the first film: Catherine is involved with a mysterious death - this time the drive in and drown demise of a celebrity footballer (played by the real-life caught-dogging soccer star Stan Collymore) - and is sent to a top psychiatrist for evaluation. The psych - played by British PM Gordon Brown-surrogate David Morrissey - is entrammelled into Catherine's world of pulp fiction, sent mad and bad and finally incarcerated in a mental home as a dangerous psychotic - his mind as blown as his dick.

The psychiatrist and the cop investigating Catherine are both figures of establishment patriarchy with feet of clay. The psychiatrist is a control freak who spectacularly mismanaged a previous case; the cop (a very funny David Thewlis) is both sexist (his first line refers to Catherine as a "c*nt") and corrupt, given to planting evidence when he thinks someone is guilty. These interior faults bring them under the sway of Catherine, leading to their undoing and her final triumph.

Who is Catherine Tramell? As in the first film, but here exaggerated to giddy extremes, she is a demiurge and mythic figure, described by one character as thinking "she is one moment omnipotent and the next has no existence at all." She is the basic life force itself (Shaw might have appreciated these films), making mockery of men's attempts to build a rational civilisation, and emerging victorious because rationality is itself full of fault-lines and fictions. The men in the film are inexorably led to their fates, like characters in Greek tragedy - as explicitly acknowledged in the film: Catherine turns to the psychiatrist and says "Don't take it so hard - even Oedipus didn't see his mother coming." Set in a post-modern London which stretches to extremes the Deleuzian notions of any-space-whatevers - "this could be anywhere, most likely could be any frontier, any hemisphere" - the film offers a vision of a phallic mankind bound to a (Catherine) wheel of destruction, in a city of the plain dominated by buildings shaped both as cocks and giant wheels.