Movie Review: Michael Douglas’s ‘Instinct’ was, and still is, good

More than 30 years later, “Basic Instinct” has kept its basics as a marvelously adult thriller.

Director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas stirred considerable discord — even with their leading lady — when the film (which MGM+ Hits presents Tuesday, Feb. 27) was released in 1992, but it remains a lushly filmed and well-performed melodrama that did nothing to diminish the box-office power Michael Douglas was enjoying at the time. He’d earned a best-actor Oscar for “Wall Street,” but he still was the go-to star to play men prone to give in to their emotional weaknesses.

Here, that man is Nick Curran, a San Francisco homicide detective still recovering from a tragic incident that welded his job to his personal vices — thus earning him the nickname “Shooter.” His investigation of an ex-rock star’s vicious murder-via-ice-pick puts him and his partner Gus (the ever-likable George Dzundza) in the trajectory of the victim’s girlfriend: Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), a behaviorally cool novelist who’s basing her newest book on Curran, to his evident dismay.

Her attitude does little to dissuade the cops that they should consider her a suspect in the killing, affirmed by their police-station interrogation of her (in a famous scene that Stone reportedly was furious about, maintaining that Verhoeven filmed her in a prurient way she didn’t expect). Even as Curran can’t make up his mind about her professed innocence, he’s drawn to her, a fact that doesn’t please Catherine’s live-in girlfriend (Leilani Sarelle, later known by her then-married last name Ferrer, and impressively tough and vulnerable at the same time here).