BASIC INSTINCT (1992; director: Paul Verhoeven)
This early 90s meisterwerk is so dedicated to being trashy, sleazy, steamy and light on the logic that it’s real easy to love if you have a taste for the tasteless. It’s slick in that Paul Verhoeven way, which means that there’s a faint smirk underneath the perfect Hollywood lighting and the troubled cop/femme fatale cliches. Everything is over the top. Verhoeven lays on the close-ups and the opulent San Francisco views. The Joe Eszterhas script is hard-boiled to the max, all snap and innuendo, with scarcely two lines of dialogue in a row that sound like anything that an actual human would say. Meanwhile, Jerry Goldsmith’s booming orchestral score lays countless exclamation points all over this cinematic purple prose.
You’ll know in the first twenty minutes if you enjoy this movie or if you think that the original film negative ought to be fed to rats. I’ll lay it out for you.