Sliver

The whole world is watching... or at least that's what the makers of Sliver would have us believe. Initial business is likely to be brisk for this wannabe sexy thriller that capitalizes on Stone's widely hyped basic instincts. The “sliver” of the title stands for the long, tall and skinny high-rise apartment buildings that New Yorkers pack themselves into. We presume that the word doesn't stand for the sliver of a story contained herein. Based on an Ira Levin novel, the story has the same sense of the architecture being an essential component of the story that we got from the Dakota Hotel in another filmization of a Levin story, Rosemary's Baby. And the movie also represents the comeback of filmdom's bad boy studio exec and indy producer Robert Evans (whose aegis, in addition to Rosemary's Baby, oversaw the first two Godfathers, Love Story, Chinatown and Goodbye, Columbus). In a turnabout from her Basic Instinct power role, Stone here plays a rather passive book editor who's just gotten out from a seven-year-long bad marriage and moves into this Eastside apartment. A nasty spate of deaths are occurring amongst its tenants who never suspect that each of their apartments is wired with video cameras that beam every fart and every orgasm up to a central display terminal. Here sits the Watcher in a bastardized throne room whose walls are embedded with scores of video monitors that bank the command post like a display at a well-stocked electronics retailer. The image is something like the video excess of The Man Who Fell to Earth but instead of that alien's neurasthenic gaze, we're supposed to believe that this is the Watcher's chosen mode of involvement in real life. The movie's conceit is its rock-bottom foundation that we are all titillated by the idea of voyeurism. Its deflation is its utter failure to give us anything that gets us off on watching. Oh sure, Stone removes her underwear rather publicly (again), and the first thing she does upon moving into her new apartment is hop into the round, glass-door enclosed bathtub for a masturbatory quickie, and she and Baldwin (who was so fulsomely sexy in the recent Three of Hearts and is so unbearably flat here) engage in sex freely, frequently and from unmissionary-like positions. But the real problem is that we care not a bit for these characters. There's no suspense, no drama, no tension, no logic. It makes you appreciate all the craft that went into Basic Instinct. And, by comparison, it almost makes Basic Instinct's ending look coherent. Throughout the movie Berenger's and Baldwin's mysteries are played off against each other so that poor Carly has to spend her time always wondering: Is he or isn't he? Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has managed to come up with an even more unsatisfying denouement with this current outing than with his previous Basic Instinct. (Though to his credit, there are reports that two other endings – one of which involved a Hawaiian volcano – were scrapped by the studio after they tested poorly.) Director Noyce (Patriot Games, Dead Calm) never brings more than a workmanlike touch to this potentially id-soaked material. Another way of saying Sliver may just be to say Slight.