We choose what reviews appear in print somewhat judiciously. We don’t automatically print the reviews of the best movies or the biggest budgeted productions, we generally pick the films that allow us to probe into the inner workings of cinema or those that allow us to wax on philosophically about some topic or other that interests us. I’ve spent numerous reviews and columns investigating what constitutes a good movie. I haven’t however, spent much time dissecting what makes up a “bad” film. Much like pornography, most people feel that they’ll know bad when they see it. Having just screened director Michael Caton-Jones’ Basic Instinct 2, it seemed like a great place to begin the search. And thus, we push aside all sorts of other more deserving films and get into the nature of ‘poor’.

I began thinking about the different types of ‘bad’ immediately after watching Basic Instinct 2 because, while bad, it’s not what one would consider a conventionally bad movie. The acting is occasionally rough, star Sharon Stone tends to fall back to growled one-liners whenever there isn’t much dialogue is a scene, but as a whole it isn’t horrible. The atmosphere of the project is fresh and the drama in the film is actually somewhat unique—for once, this sequel is not a simple rehashing of the original. That said though, Basic Instinct 2 is still patently bad and almost overwhelmingly so.

Stone returns here as promiscuous femme fatale, Catherine Trammell. Trammell has again written a book about death that then takes place; unlike the first Basic Instinct, this time is undeniably her handiwork. She is not charged with any crime because of a technicality and it’s here that the supposed fun starts. Deciding to work on herself, Trammell starts visiting the police therapist, Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), who labeled her ‘addicted to risk’ during the wrongful death investigation. Gratuity and luridness soon follow.

Written by Leona Barrish and Henry Bean (read the Stumped? article on Bean), Basic Instinct 2 is filled with to distinct qualities: 1) befuddling psycho babble along the lines of ‘risk addiction’ and 2) horribly unlikable characters. Catherine Trammell worked as well as she did in director Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct because her iciness and one-dimensional nature were buffered by Michael Douglas’ Nick Curran. While Curran didn’t necessarily evoke Bambi-like sympathy from audiences, he gave the movie an undeniable second presence; a strong character who would keep viewers from constantly focusing on what a cold-hearted, manipulative, sociopath Trammell really was. Basic Instinct 2’s second lead, Morrissey, is a stiff, pouty British psychologist with incredibly poor impulse control for a man with his myriad of post graduate training whose very existence does nothing but highlight the chasm of tolerable people in the movie. Watching a movie and constantly wondering how any of the characters have friends is a really bad sign for any project.

Presenting its lead characters as such to the audience, Basic Instinct 2 has effectively placed a largess of apathy into its proceedings. It’s extremely hard to care about a movie when you don’t care about either of the film’s leads or if anything bad happens to them; call it the Sideways corollary, if you will. Good movies don’t reduce their audiences to hoping and praying that the leads will suffer a dehabilitating accident or, at very least, get hit with a falling piano. And, in a nutshell, this is why Basic Instinct 2 fails. It’s not a plethora of gross-out humor that involves Seann William Scott or a poorly animated talking dog, or severely unbelievable plot twists that are predicated around a lack of comprehension of the basic laws of physics, it was a studio executive’s decision to green light a script by Barrish and Bean that thrusts two wholly detestable, uninteresting and unworthy lead characters into the limelight, effectively hampering the project’s believability and Caton-Jones’ filmmaking abilities from the start.

Jake Lever