Few movies have evoked as strong reactions or led to animated discussions among college students and office goers alike as Basic Instinct has in recent years. Though criticisms have been acerbic against the movie, the fact remains that it actually made people sit up and watch it again and again. If the success of a movie is judged solely by the money it rakes in at the BO, Basic Instinct is a clear winner. If success is judged by the number of awards won at Film Festivals or by the number of reams of newspaper dedicated to its reviews, BI still remains a screaming winner. I would be labeled a hypocrite if I were to declare that I didn’t like the movie even after watching it a dozen times…hence my rating of 4 stars.
Released in 1991 to a thunderous opening, the movie starred Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone and went on to rake in “moolah” by the millions. The movie made a super star of Sharon Stone, who plays the role of an ice pick wielding bi-sexual who courted controversy and publicity in a famous reveal-it-all scene.
There’s only slightly more in the movie by way of a story/plot than the hair on my head (which you can see in my snap). An aging rock star has been sextered (had sex and got murdered) and Detective Nick Curran (Douglas) is assigned the case of tracking the killer. All fingers point towards Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) but there’s no evidence to prove that she had committed the murder. The rest of the story is inconsequential. 10 reels, half a dozen killings and 30 minutes of libido inducing scenes later, Douglas and his band are nowhere close to unraveling the murder as they are before it.
Douglas keeps trailing Stone for half the movie, and she reciprocates it for the other half but who’s complaining? Either way, I wouldn’t dare to even blink for a second! What works in favour of the movie inspite of a weak story line is the stunningly picturised scenes between Stone and Douglas. When I watched it for the first time, I was shocked that the movie even got clearance from the Indian Censor Board. On second thoughts, I felt they deserved an award for clearing it.
The picturisation of the scenes gives the impression that the director (Paul Verhoeven) intended it to be more of a visual erotica than a genuine thriller. Just when things begin to get really hot, he seems to have got fed up of the on-screen antics of the lead pair and decided to focus on the originally intended central theme/plot again. The only other thing that manages to hold out attention throughout the movie (apart from the 2 stars) is an enigmatic ice-pick which Stone handles from time to time as though it were her version of King Arthur’s “Excalibur”.
It was only after I had watched the movie for the sixth time did I realise that the director and producers of the movie had taken the public for a royal ride. That’s because the movie ends exactly as it begins with the public being none the wiser as to what exactly the movie was all about! The bottomline, however proves that 99.99% of the paying public got more than full value for their time and money and there would have been no one who was disappointed with it.
On the technical side, the cameraman must have freaked out while filming all those steamy sequences, especially when he pans on Stone. She turns in a role of a lifetime and I sincerely felt she deserved the “Oscar of the century” for her effort. She virtually lives and breathes her role in every scene and I daresay no one could have done better justice to that role. She ignites the screen with her sex appeal and immense self-confidence whenever she comes online (sic!). Mr. Douglas just about fits the bill as a playboy in Stone’s hands with his handsome looks and lean build. The morose band of bumbling cops are worse than Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five” and act as good fillers whenever Stone and Douglas go off the screen to prepare for their next adventure.
The Direction is energetic, the screen play is enticing and music (Jerry Goldsmith) is seducing – all adding up to a good combination and ably supporting the movie throughout. I won’t bother talking about aspects like dialogues because they are so amateurish as to give an impression that their writer had just graduated from Class I.
Last heard, Paul Verhoeven was planning to come back with a sequence, “Basic Instinct II” – with Stone but without Douglas. Will he be able to whip up the magic again? Your guess is as good as mine!