Basic Instinct

TriStar Pictures | Release Date: March 20, 1992

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

43	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 28 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

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. Read full review

Jay Boyar

Bad politics sometimes makes for good movies, and the harsh, politically incorrect truth about Basic Instinct is that it's a tantalizing, suspensefully correct thriller. Read full review

Joe Pollack

A splendid murder mystery, but one with as much gore and steamy sex as I've seen in a long time. [20 Mar 1992, p.3F]

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. Read full review

Janet Maslin

Basic Instinct transfers Mr. Verhoeven's flair for action-oriented material to the realm of Hitchcockian intrigue, and the results are viscerally effective even when they don't make sense. Drawing powerfully on the seductiveness of his actors and the intensity of their situation, Mr. Verhoeven easily suspends all disbelief. Read full review

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. Read full review

Jay Carr

Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct is a slick, trashy, blatantly manipulative thriller that you won't stop watching once you start. [20 Mar 1992, p.25]

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]

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. Read full review

Stephen Hunter

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit. Read full review

Carrie Rickey

Basic Instinct's characters lack psychology and therefore motive. Admittedly they possess pathology, but that's not enough to maintain suspense in a movie with plot holes big enough to drive a tank through. Read full review

James Berardinelli

Joe Eszterhas' screenplay doesn't make sense, and he doesn't bother to hide this fact. In the end, Basic Instinct teases and screws us with the same efficiency that the film's femme fatale handles the protagonist. Read full review

Hal Lipper

Basic Instinct has the action and gore of Verhoeven's Total Recall and the cool sheen of his equally bloody RoboCop. Verhoeven can deliver style in spades, but Eszterhas' jumble of confusing plot twists and conventional movie cliches proves fatal. [20 Mar 1992, p.29]

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff [Not 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. Read full review

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]

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). Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

Barry Johnson

One suspects that [Verhoeven's] produced exactly the movie he wanted to produce: fast, cynical and profitable. Cha-ching. [20 Mar 1992, p.AE17]

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]

Bill Cosford

I'd have thought you'd get more for $3 million. The dialogue here is among the worst in modern big-budget memory; even the cliches are lame. [20 Mar 1992, p.G5]

Dave Kehr

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world. Read full review

Rita Kempley

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

Stanley Kauffmann

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

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. Read full review

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. Read full review