Basic Instinct

Variety Staff (Not Credited)

Grade-A pulp fiction. This erotically charged thriller about the search for an ice-pick murderer in San Francisco rivets attention through its sleek style, attractive cast doing and thinking kinky things, and story, which is as weirdly implausible as it is intensely visceral.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The film is for horny pups of all ages who relish the memory of reading stroke books under the covers with a flashlight. Verhoeven has spent $49 million to reproduce that dirty little thrill on the big screen.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, though, Basic Instinct is mechanical and routine, a muddle of Hitchcockian red herrings and standard cop-thriller ballistics.

USA Today Mike Clark

The film never makes total sense, but at its best (the first half-hour), it comes closer to solidly junky titillation than the hapless Final Analysis. [20 Mar 1992, Life, p.1D]

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Uninvolving. Even the sex is boring. Are these scenes supposed to be wildly erotic? If they are, they don't work. [20 Mar 1992, Daily Notebook, p.D1]

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work quite effectively as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick--or rather, your ice pick).

Austin Chronicle Kathleen Maher

Verhoeven's film is fascinating, if stupid and stylish, if shallow. The story has to move along at a fair clip because otherwise we'd notice how nonsensical it all is. And there is very little to connect with emotionally.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.

Time Richard Schickel

This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels. [23 Mar 1992, p.65]

TV Guide Staff (Non Credited)

The worst things about Basic Instinct, though, are the explicit "love" scenes. They're supposed to contribute to a heady equation in which sex, violence and psychology are fused; instead, they're gratuitous, exploitative, and entirely unerotic.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A reminder of the difference between exhilaration and exhaustion, between tension and hysteria, between eroticism and exhibitionism. The line may be fine, but it is real enough to separate the great thrillers from the also-rans. And Basic Instinct is not a great thriller. [20 Mar 1992, Calendar, p.F-1]

Empire Mark Dinning

There’s still a guilty pleasure to be had in the ludicrous sex scenes (either we’re doing it very wrong, or Sharon Stone suffers from the most melodramatic orgasms known to womankind) and in Michael Douglas’ spectacular tank tops, of course.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Verhoeven's lurid thriller has moments of welcome self-parody, but most of the action manages to be sensationalistic, homophobic, and tedious at the same time. [20 Mar 1992, Arts, p.12]

Washington Post Desson Thomson

What isn't so fascinating is this movie's absurdity of motivation. No one does anything that makes sense. No one seems real. When the actual perpetrator is uncovered, there is no enlightenment as to why the killing occurred.

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

The $3 million reportedly paid for Mr. Eszterhas's screenplay did not buy a coherent ending.

Chicago Tribune Dave Kehr

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world. [20 Mar 1992, Friday, p.C]

Washington Post Rita Kempley

What we have here is a movie with not just one, but a family pack of psychos.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

It's just one more dunk in the slime pit of exploitation. [13 Apr 1992, p.26]

The New Yorker Terrence Rafferty

A vicious, grindingly manipulative urban mystery that uses a thick atmosphere of S & M kinkiness to distract the audience from the story's thinness and inanity.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jay Scott

A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting.