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...A less artful director would have cut back and forth between the lovers' coupling and the dancers gyrating for the sake of cheap amplification, but Verhoeven leaves the aerobics in long shot so that the distant line of leotarded bodies contributes only an erotic vibration that nicely heightens the lovemaking in the foreground...

...The opposite is true of Douglas...

...At one point, when George Dzundza got into his car, the fellow seated next to me predicted to a pal that it would blow up because Stone had wired it...

...and The Music Box (Jessica Lange just knows her father can't be a concentration camp sadist and yet, and yet...

...I'll never know but it does seem as if Verhoeven has given the material everything it requires: peek-a-boo sex...

...When you're that rich, you'll do anything...

...He's superficially decent enough to want to clear Stone but really wants to find her guilty so that the erotic charge that her putative murderousness gives him will continue...

...Insensitive...

...But there are several crucial differences between Basic Instinct and the previous movies...

...In the role of a foul-mouthed, good-slob sidekick, George Dzundza moves so comfortably that he might as well take out a patent on the part if John Goodman's has expired...

...brutal action...

...Is she really a killer at all...

...A moment later, he certainly does die, quite literally and violently, in full view of the audience when his rivals seize, stab, and hang him...

...For instance, at one point Douglas visits his psychological counselor (Douglas is being treated after his accidental killing of an innocent bystander), who is also his ex-lover...

...When no such explosion occurred, the pal chaffed the predictor, who replied, "Man, I thought she would of done it...

...Far in the background, through the apartment's window, we see an aerobics class in session in a room of the opposite apartment house...

...Their protagonists were women who, from the start, had emotional investments in the men they were investigating and/or defending...

...And, when Douglas finally falls for Stone emotionally as well as sexually and therefore starts wishing to see her vindicated, the movie takes on the dramatic shape of three other Eszterhas scripts: Jagged Edge (Glenn Close just knows that Jeff Bridges can't be a psycho-killer and yet, and yet...

...With the aid of Verhoeven and De Bont, she uses her ice-goddess beauty as a weapon...

...Since we have not actually seen the murderess's face, and since the mounting evidence gradually implicates two women other than Stone, Joe Eszterhas's screenplay does have a conventional whodunnit aspect...

...Commonweal 24 April 1992: 19 The big thrill promised to the audiences of Basic Instinct is that they get to see Michael Douglas first "die" and then die between the thighs of Sharon Stone...

...Sharon Stone gleams as the main suspect...

...This entails another difference from the earlier scripts: their heroines longed to establish the innocence of their loved ones but feared to uncover guilt...

...Like Al Pacino, he has intensity but is often unable to bring that intensity to a boil...

...The accusation by some gay groups that this movie contributes to homophobia is a canard...

...Sharon Stone's character is bisexual, but her lesbianism isn't an expression of her suspected murderousness but of her power, i.e., the license that wealth, brains, and looks bestow...

...A lot of superficial evidence points to the dead man's sex partner, a gorgeous and wealthy trash-novelist, played by Stone...

...Now we find out that the novelist depicted just such a murder as the pivotal scene of her latest book...

...fetishistic treatment of expensive things, places, and people...

...His pursuit of Stone is both investigatory and amorous...

...Most important contrast: Close, Winger, and Lange all remained staunch defenders of morality no matter what they found out about their men...

...Given this sensationalistic material with its gutter-profane dialogue, necessarily monochromatic characterization, and ridiculously high body count, it's bewildering to read (in the March 15 New York Times) that "Mr...

...Douglas, who is called a "shooter" by his fellow cops because of his triggerhappy ways, takes up the gauntlet...

...Was the initial draft of the script Chekhovian...

...As Douglas's shrink-lover, Jeanne Tripplehorn works alchemy: she turns a plot component into a human being...

...But the major discovery Douglas makes is of his own murderous nature: he needs a killer as his sex partner because he himself has a killer instinct...

...But can Stone really be that partner...

...Though the staging concealed the killer's face, we saw her dispatch an ice pick right after bringing him to climax...

...He initiates intercourse...

...Eszterhas regarded as the director's insensitive interpretation of the script...

...If you want to see what I mean by believable fury, just rent A Shock to the System and watch Michael Caine explode at Peter Riegert...

...The young lover of Thomas Kyd's play, The Spanish Tragedy, enjoys a tryst with his inamorata in which the word provides the keynote of the scene...

...And, in a disco scene in which Stone's lesbian lover, while dancing with someone else, jealously watches Stone and Douglas cavort, the furious woman's slashing, sideways dance-moves perfectly express her anger and potential violence...

...The feeling that this woman can and may do anything is a major titillation of the film and it's conveyed by her dare-devil driving, plush house, and brazen defiance of the police as well as by the sight of her nuzzling other women...

...Eszterhas engaged in public spats with the director, Paul Verhoeven, over what Mr...

...The gallant promises to "die" in the arms of his beauty...

...That sense of heat isn't generated only by nudity and mimed sex...

...Several times the couple go to bed and each time the audience gets to squeal in prurient anticipation as Stone's right hand moves toward some object near or under her bed...

...Douglas plays a police officer in charge of the investigation of a rock singer's violent death...

...We have witnessed the murder at the film's start...

...hints of perversity beyond the rather commonplace perversities we actually see...

...All of the acting is at least adequate, but Michael Douglas's is only just that...

...Though Douglas's obsession with Stone deepens, it is first and last a matter of Eros stimulated by Thanatos: he longs to "die" making love to her precisely because he may also die doing so...

...and, most important of all, sheer heat...

...Betrayed (Debra Winger just knows that Tom Berenger can't be a racist hitman and yet, and yet...

...Douglas's explosions (and many are required by the script) lack real fury...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 20: 24 April 1992 Commonweal...

...slam-bang car chases...

...She informs Douglas that she is now working on a new fiction about a detective who falls in love with a murderess and is finally killed by her...

...racy delivery of racy dialogue...

...He merely screams at the end of a sentence and pounds the nearest table...

...lucid unraveling of the detective story aspects...

...That guy understood what powers this movie better than the protesters do...

...photography by Jan De Bont that uses the lights and shadows of California for both baleful and erotic effects...