(2 of 2)
We don't blame Verhoeven, the director of two sleek, inventive Hollywood fantasies (RoboCop, Total Recall), for making this movie--though we're surprised he can bear to watch it. The real culprit is Eszterhas, swami of the High Concept. He found Nazis in The Music Box and white supremacists in Betrayed, but cogent drama in neither. His favorite plot hook, sexual mutilation, bore rancid fruit in Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct and Sliver. At least those three had some sick kick to them. But if his women characters aren't psychos or sex-crime victims, the scripts get shrill and turgid. After an hour of naughty chat in Showgirls, you'll start hoping for somebody to kill somebody.
Eszterhas must be great at pitching stories, because the screenwriting craft eludes him. A mild gag here--the mispronouncing of Gianni Versace's name--is tortured into an endless motif. Nomi has a clouded past, but that doesn't explain why she is such a gratingly annoying creature. The giddiest moment in this All About Evil by way of 42nd Street comes when a club owner is asked whether the revue should close down because the star is out sick. "Not a chance!" he actually says. "The show goes on!"
Eszterhas has urged teenagers to use fake IDs to get into his movie, to which Hollywood czar Jack Valenti declares, "Someone who would make that statement needs professional counseling--it's so palpably stupid." The screenwriter also insists the film has a modern, even feminist moral: "The message is that you don't have to sell your soul to make it."
Which only proves he is as good at disinformation as he is at disentertainment. Nomi gets one job after having sex with the hotel's entertainment director (Kyle MacLachlan) and a better one after pushing the headliner down a flight of stairs. She has no soul to sell, no morals to corrupt. Kinda like the film. For 2 hrs. 11 min., Showgirls offers a slumming party inside the moviemakers' libidos. Ladies and gents, no matter how curious or horny you think you are, you don't want to be there.
--With reporting by Patrick E.Cole/Los Angeles