Review of Sliver (1993) by Rose A — 16 Jul 2011

Since "erotic thriller" came to fashion after Basic Instinct, it's no wonder they tried to repeat the formula with Sharon. What happend was, that SS had the honours of playing lead role in the best (Basic) and worst (Sliver) "90's erotic thriller".. just within a year.

That kind of sums it up. Sliver is pretty much a wanna be-"Basic" lacking everything that made the latter work. While Basic was solid, hitchcockish police investigation story boosted with sex scenes, "Sliver" doesn't really even have a real story or interesting characters. I'm no dramaturgial expert, but isn't it kind of hard to develop something that doesn't exist?

And while "Basic" relyed on charisma of Michael Douglas, "Sliver" tries to rely on Sharon. Big mistake. Sharons hot, but no Merryl Streep. And William Baldwin is certainly no M. Douglas. What's incomprehensible to me is that we have a actor like Tom Berenger on board, but he's given such a minor, shitty role. He could have bailed out this goddamn Titanic! Also script is moronic. The "sexy" scenes and one liners are embarrassing and.. Yeah. I could go on and on. All I can say about this "genre" is, that you should rather boost functional movie with sex, than boost sex with random crap.

Ironically the "reality tv"-concept itself was not half bad. Quite ahead of it's time actually. Someone could have scraped together a decent movie out of this.