SLIVER

The question posed by the ad campaign for Sliver is 'You like to watch, don't you?' The answer is frankly yes, but not crap like this.

The title has a sinister ring to it. In a David Cronenburg film, a sliver would be a slug that crawled into bodily orifices, infected the liver and turned their host into a rabid killer. And with Sharon Stone in the title role, a plot involving bodily orifices and multiple homicide would seem to be on the cards but it transpires that a sliver is an American real estate term for a thin, high rise building. In Ireland we would just call it a block of flats, but that doesn't really have the same marketing potential, does it?

So lovingly does the camera admire the spacious rooms and designer furnishings, Sliver could indeed have been filmed by an estate agent. In the first scene a blonde woman is tossed from the window of her luxury apartment but they have no problem immediately renting out the vacant flat to another blonde (Sharon Stone). She soon realises that there is a homicidal maniac on the loose and that every one of the rooms is illegally wired for video but she shows no inclination to move out. This is New York after all, where a good apartment is hard to come by and murder is a small price to pay.

Sliver's makers would like it to be perceived as an essay on voyeurism. In case you have trouble coming to this conclusion, they never miss an opportunity to point it out to you. Sharon watches her neighbours through a telescope, only to find them staring through another telescope back at her. An elderly neighbour informs her he teaches a class on 'the psychology of the lens' while in the foreground a security camera follows their movements. Sharon and her hunky beau William Baldwin pause to pose for the cameras in front of an electronics shop. Throughout the film, all the action in the apartments is being monitored on video screens. And hey, we're watching it all on the big screen.

If this is intended as an ironic metaphor for the increasing loss of privacy in our times, it is undermined by the nature of the film's own voyeurism. The message seems to be confused between mind your own damn business and life is one big soap opera so try not to get bubbles on the lens. The possibility of the film-makers holding the high moral ground is completely undermined by the lecherous way the camera roams over Sharon's body as she masturbates in the bath.

We are called on to disapprove of the voyeur watching her on video, yet Stone's sexuality is the film's main selling point. This, after all is what we are paying to see, and they give it to us in spades. The result is more Rear End than Rear Window. Yes indeed. Sliver is all surface and no substance, wearing everything on its sleeve and nothing under its skirt.

Which is, of course, what Ms Stone is famous for. She is the kind of actress who submits for a gynaecological examination in lieu of an audition. In Basic Instinct she achieved international stardom by flashing during a police interview. In Sliver, playing a non-ice-pick wielding career woman, she starts off with her knickers on, but, unable to resist stereotyping, soon wriggles out of them in a restaurant and hands them to her host.

Basic Instinct allegedly made short skirts and bare bottoms a fashion item amongst actresses in L.A. Perhaps Sharon's new trick will catch on too, as an alternative way of saying "thanks for the meal" or, if one is really daring, tipping the waiter,

Stone's performance, filled with unexpected vulnerability and tentative daring, is actually one of the best things about Sliver, but it is almost entirely undermined by this one knicker dropping scene. It reminds us that what the producers are trying to serve us is another dose of Basic Instinct, an adrenaline rush of sex and violence, never mind that the source material lends itself more to creeping paranoia.

Author Ira Levin was well served by Roman Polanski on Rosemary's Baby. The insidious threat with which Polanski is capable of investing the everyday and the inanimate would have benefited Sliver too, but here Levin's book has not so much been misinterpreted by director Philip Noyce (an industry journeyman who proved he could thrill with Dead Calm and that he'd do anything for money with Patriot Games) as hijacked by Joe Eszterhaus.

The highest paid scriptwriter in movies today (if not ever), Eszterhaus is a one note crowd pleaser whose increasingly formulaic thrillers (Jagged Edge, Betrayed, Music Box and, of course, Basic Instinct) hang on the simple issue of whether an obvious but attractive suspect is really committing the hideous crimes or not (the twist being that they usually did exactly what we all thought they did in the first place, if you can call that a twist).

For Sliver, Eszterhaus gives us a pair of attractive suspects, each more obvious than the other. Is it hunky William Baldwin, an idle playboy with voyeuristic tendencies, or chunky Tom Berenger, an idle bestselling author with sexually aggressive come on techniques? Frankly, both characters have been so blatantly contrived to add up to an air of murderous mystery, behaving in ways specifically designed to draw suspicion on themselves, that it is hard to care (or even follow) who is exactly supposed to have done what.

And, much like Basic Instinct, the denouement does not exactly make retrospective sense. It is all a twist too far. It is easy to imagine it has been filmed with alternative endings, and left to preview audiences to nominate the guilty party.

As a pulp author, Berenger expresses shock that Sharon Stone, a book editor, has not read his novel Flesh and Blood. "You don't like sex and violence?" he remarks incredulously. "It sells you know." That is the entire raison d'etre behind Sliver, to deliver flesh and blood, sex and violence and sell it by the bucketloads.

Unfortunately, by attempting to turn a skyscraper thriller into a major blockbuster, all they have succeeded in constructing is a high rise disaster.

RATING: * * *