film | Breast stroke

Apparently bankrolled because some benevolent Hollywood honcho decided that 2006 needed a Showgirls to call its own, BASIC INSTINCT 2 stumbles into theaters with a troubled production history — and the grace of a plastered frat boy — a long 14 years after the 1992 original courted mega-controversy for its lurid content and turned Sharon Stone, now 48, into America's bisexual-icepick-murderess sweetheart. Stone, tellingly, is the only holdover from Instinct 1; gone from the first film are its leading man (Michael Douglas), its director (Paul Verhoeven), its scribe (Joe Eszterhas), its kinky menace, its trashy allure and, generally, its pulse.

Stone reprises her household-name-making role as Catherine Tramell, a brilliant and seductive mystery writer whose violent, racy fiction has the peculiar habit of predicting true-life bloodshed. In Basic Instinct 2, she's relocated to London — after screwing and stabbing her way through the entire straight-guy population of San Francisco, presumably — to bring her carnal mindgames to the Y-chromos (OK, and the occasional lady) of an entirely new country. She's fingered — no, literally — in the fishy death of a British football star, then court-ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by the repressed, stodgy Dr. Michael Glass (Hilary & Jackie's David Morrissey), a shrink with an office on one of the top floors of the über-phallic Swiss Re skyscraper that's slangily referred to as "the gherkin." Freud would have a field day with this movie.

As Catherine starts to suggestively slink around Michael's personal and professional circles, his friends and associates begin to drop dead, of course, and Basic Instinct 2 shifts its focus to interactions among a web of nondescript and expendable stock secondary parts that includes David Thewlis (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as "the sputtering detective," Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool) as "the concerned colleague," and Indira Varma (HBO's Rome) as "the vulnerable ex-wife." Suddenly shuffled off to the sidelines, Stone becomes more of an overhead presence than an integral ingredient of the story. You kinda wonder if Leora Barish and Henry Bean's screenplay existed as a paint-by-numbers psychological thriller that sat unproduced and collecting dust on a cluttered studio shelf before the Catherine Tramell character was shoehorned into it, as Stone pops up like a syphilis-encrusted whack-a-mole whenever Basic Instinct 2 needs a lame double entendre, a boob shot or some dirty talk.

Stone's performance contains a lot of faux smoldering and sneery posturing, the fakest orgasms the entertainment industry's heard since Liza Minelli and Peter Allen's honeymoon, and too many line deliveries that scream: CAN YOU FREAKIN' BELIEVE HOW DAMN SEXY I AM?! She's either: A) voraciously trying to prove that aging actresses can still be sensual; or B) aware there's no way in hell this Basic-Instinct-sequel conceit's gonna work and, therefore, playing it as campy spoofery. I fear it's A), but if B)'s true, well, yay, but director Michael Caton-Jones (Rob Roy) really should've advised the rest of the team to follow suit, especially Morrissey, who looks so sour and uncomfortable in every scene that you suspect somebody's holding a carton of expired milk just out of frame.

The previous Instinct essentially exhausted the premise: The final image revealed Catherine did it, case closed, which leaves the follow-up all dressed skanky with nowhere suspenseful to go. And despite its endlessly put-on naughtiness, it's shockingly tame. Basic Instinct actually pushed boundaries, while Basic Instinct 2 merely has Stone pull a leather belt around Morrissey's neck while they're gettin' busy, and wasn't that on an episode of Red Shoe Diaries, like, a decade ago? Ultimately, Basic Instinct 2's biggest sin isn't that it's not as sleazy as its predecessor. It's that it never even tries to be. D