Crimes:
• Having Sharon Stone reprise her role as an annoyingly fatale-ish femme, without wrapping her in the irony that director Paul Verhoeven brought to the original
• Staging ridiculous sex scenes, designed to show off Stone's surgically enhanced, trainer-toned, thoroughly un-sexy android body
• Packing all its shock and fizz into an opening sequence that has Stone masturbating while racing through the streets of London in a car with her drug-addict athlete lover, then settling in for two hours of not much
Defender: Director Michael Caton-Jones
Tone of commentary: Vain and a little defensive. Caton-Jones lays out what he was trying to do early on, then spends the rest of the track exercising what may be the most overused word in DVD commentaries: "again." As in, "Again, here's the theme of reflection." His other favorite phrase is "people think," as in, "People think that everything we do in a film is done under optimum situations." His prickliness reaches its peak when he talks about the sex scenes. "I know there was a lot of discussion and conjecture about 'how much sex, too much sex, not enough sex,' but in the end, you're in the hands of some people in California who are soccer moms."
What went wrong: Caton-Jones says he read the script without knowing it was a Basic Instinct sequel, and when he found out, he thought, "Well, it could still be pretty good." He tried to maintain some of the "campy knowingness" of the first film (which he says he watched once), because "Sequels are about giving people the same thing, only slightly different." He adds, "This was never meant to be a cure for cancer."
Comments on the cast: The close-ups required Stone and co-star David Morrissey to "go very deep and do very little."
Inevitable dash of pretension: The opening sequence is meant to "indicate the feeling of sex… There's an ejaculation as the car flies through the air."
Commentary in a nutshell: "I wouldn't expect the layman to understand. There's a lot of sophistication going on here."