There is absolutely no room in 2006 for Sharon Stone's 48-year-old breasts.
Since Basic Instinct 2 sports scarcely any other images -- excepting car crashes and endlessly-recurring exteriors of large phallic buildings which can all be read as metaphors for Sharon Stone's breasts -- I am going to venture that there is no room in 2006 for Basic Instinct 2.
A sad attempt to revive the '80s/'90s sex thriller genre, Basic Instinct 2 suffers from severe temporal confusion. Deeply embedded in its anachronistic style, the film's narrative brings us back to the medium's early days, invoking a "cinema of attractions" aesthetic. Basic Instinct 2 precludes the possibility of voyeurism. By annihilating any plot or coherent story to be enjoyed here, the film relapses into a self-disruptive series of pornographic images. Breasts, tall buildings and car crashes, sometimes in reverse order, pollute Basic's diegesis. It's a shame Michael Caton-Jones forgot to leave room for a story.
To be fair, the theme of human survival parades as a humble motivation for these rambling sequences of licentious nonsense. The title and narrative even come full circle at the realization that sex and violence -- the film's only two things -- dually function as representations of man's basic instincts.
Reluctantly, the film also pretends to have a plot: novelist Catherine Tramell (Stone) finds herself on the wrong side of the law. Thus, she seduces the Scotland Yard psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), assigned to her case. However, this skeleton of a half-baked story is but a tool of the film's actual narrative: Stone's plastic-surgeried physique and large buildings and cars exploding.
That being said, if at some point in the future I hap upon this film on cable television, my basic instinct will be to change the channel.
