'INSTINCT 2' LACKS A LEG TO STAND ON.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Anticipation. It's supposed to have a big effect on the primal urges of lust, fright and revenge. It can be a delicious feeling, or at least a consuming one. But when something that's been passionately awaited fails to pay off after too long a tease, well, it makes you just want to ice-pick something.

"Basic Instinct 2" is way overdue (the original adventure in leg-crossing came out in 1992). And while there was little doubt that the sequel would be the awful movie that it is, "BI2" compounds the injury by, basically, taking forever to get to what little good, lurid stuff anyone coming to the movie wants to see.

Yes, it does open with a ridiculous, high-speed drive through nighttime London. Sharon Stone's mystery writer/probable serial killer Catherine Tramell is at the wheel, a drugged soccer star rides shotgun and pleasures the lead-footed lady at the same time, and the whole risky business ends up at the bottom of the Thames.

But that's about it, actionwise, for what seems like an eternity of screen time.

Roy Washburn (David Thewlis), a Scotland Yard detective with a bad attitude and a worse accent, is convinced that Tramell, who managed to swim to the surface, somehow made sure that the sports hero didn't. She's got the best defense attorney her massive wealth can buy, so Washburn calls in top shrink Michael Glass (David Morrissey, seen doing the Rolling Stones' dirty work in last week's "Stoned") to run a forensic psychoanalysis that could nail her.

This results in a lot of really bad dialogue - dry, mental-wonk stuff from him, howlingly arch, provocative one-liners from her - as doctor and subject perform cat-and-mouse head games on each other for a year or three (not really, it just seems to take that long).

Of course, Glass becomes as sexually obsessed with Tramell as Michael Douglas' San Francisco cop did before. Regrettably, Morrissey is not as compellingly watchable a movie star as Douglas, so Glass' slow descent into horny stupidity never really grabs us where it should.

As for Stone, well, she's either invented a unique new form of facial expression for the camera, or Botox does strange things. At least vocally, she can still spin amusingly kinky sound bites out of Tramell's insinuating manipulations, but it's harder this time due to the awfulness of Leora Barish and Henry Bean's bathroom-graffiti dialogue. Who thought we'd ever long for Joe Eszterhas' delicate wordcraft?

From the neck down, Stone, 47 at the time this was filmed, performs spectacularly. Like violence and any sense of real mystery, though, it's quite some time before a hint of nudity reaches the screen. Oh, and remember the interrogation sequence from Paul Verhoeven's original "Instinct"? You know you do. This time, four words: Black panties stay on.

Sequel director Michael Caton-Jones tries to make up for what he laughably lacks in explicit imaginativeness with a kind of architectural symbolism. Glass' office is in the phallic steel-and-glass building the Brits call The Gherkin. London's trendiest clubs and most modernized districts provide the bulk of the film's locations. This looks self-consciously silly after a while. But those images are among the film's most intelligent elements.

I mean, they appear that way compared to how ludicrously twisty Bean and Barish's script gets, once it finally does get in gear. There are so many mind-messes, red herrings and rudimentary guilt transferrals in the third act that they make you want to give up sex thrillers for good.

And if you feel the same way about sex after watching "Basic Instinct 2," that's OK. It isn't your fault.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

BASIC INSTINCT 2 - One star

Our rating: (R: violence, sex, nudity, language, drug use)

Starring: Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling.

Director: Michael Caton-Jones.

Running time: 1 hr. 53 min.

Playing: In wide release.

In a nutshell: Sharon Stone is back as the novelist/murderer (?), vamping her way through London and turning the sex-and-murder franchise into low, joyless camp.