Written by: Susan Granger
http://www.susangranger.com

It's said that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. But there's barely a flicker re-igniting this desperate diva's wanton spark. And when a movie is THIS bad, I'm always curious what happened.

Set in London, the plot revolves around an aggressively seductive novelist, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), who is accused of drugging and killing a soccer star in the river Thames. When a suspicious Scotland Yard detective (David Thewlis) asks a criminal psychiatrist (David Morrissey) to evaluate the devious femme fatale, the troubled doctor perceptively diagnoses her "risk addiction" yet gets tangled in a murky web of depraved deceit, despite warnings from a concerned colleague (Charlotte Rampling). 

"She's not worth it," the detective warns. Truer words were never spoken.

Hollywood bad boy Joe Eszterhas, creator of the original 1992 "Basic Instinct" and once TinselTown's highest-paid screenwriter, shrewdly chose to pass on this sequel, saying you cannot re-create that raw sexuality; for abstaining, he was paid a half-million dollars. 

So Leora Barish and Henry Bean fashioned the teasing, taunting yet ultimately embarrassing dialogue. Instead Paul Verhoeven's erotic tension which reached its zenith when Stone flashed Michael Douglas in the police station, director Michael Caton-Jones simply puts the actors through their paces with a tinge of stale ambiguity. While 48 year-old Stone remains sultry, if coarse, David Morrissey is simply dull-as-dishwater.

After years of legal wrangling, including a $100 million breach-of-contract lawsuit she filed against the film's producers, Stone has brought this vanity project to the screen. Hopefully, that means she can return to the more subtle style she exhibited in last year's "Broken Flowers."

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Basic Instict 2" is a sordid, ludicrous 1. It's a steamy stink-bomb.