Movies
“Sliver” Is A Hard Pass. Thanks For Nothing Billy Baldwin.
Sliver forces the audience to shy away from the screen because of its subject matter and how it goes about illustrating its debaucherous sleazy nature.
“A woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets.”
Director: Phillip Noyce
Writers: Ira Levin
Staring: Sharon Stone, William Baldwin, Tom Berenger
Release Date: May 21, 1993
IMDB
October is spooky season. It is the time of year when you are meant to watch movies that make you uncomfortable. Sliver (1993) is not a horror movie, by any stretch of the imagination. However, Sliver does the same exact thing as any good horror movie. It forces you to curl up in a ball and hide your eyes and cover your ears.
Unfortunately, Sliver reaches the same endpoints not through suspense or thrills. Sliver forces the audience to shy away from the screen because of its subject matter and how it goes about illustrating its debaucherous sleazy nature.
Sliver is an attempt at an erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone as Carly Norris. As a young and successful editor, Carly does not have much time for dating, but her romantic world is thrown upside down when she meets Zeke Hawkins in her new apartment. William Baldwin plays the part of the aloof Zeke and he is wooing Carly anyway he can.
While this romance is progressing, Sliver is also progressing along with a crime subplot. As it turns out, there have been numerous deaths in this particular apartment building, including one in the very apartment that Carly has taken over.
Jack Lansford, played by Tom Berenger, is an old detective with an uneasy feeling toward Zeke. Jack also has a crush on Carly (we need a love triangle, don’t we?) and he tries to tell her that Zeke can not be trusted. Carly senses an uneasiness around Zeke, yet she also can’t resist the games he likes to play.
The massive twist of Sliver (which isn’t one at all because the film makes no attempt to try and hide it) is that Zeke is the owner of the apartment. With this power, he has installed cameras and microphones in every room. Zeke makes it his job to know everything that is happening in his building, yet he claims he never steps in.
Do we believe him as the audience? What does Carly do when she realizes Zeke is this type of controlling man? Does one deserve this type of power?
These existential questions don’t matter at all because Sliver doesn’t deserve to have any of them answered.
One year prior, Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone lit up the screen in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992). Director Phillip Noyce tries to recreate that erotic excitement with Stone playing the damsel rather than the domineer. The experiment does not work, though Stone is not to blame. THe brunt of the blame falls on one man, and that is William Baldwin.
Who thought that it would be a good idea to cast William Baldwin as a sexy leading man? The man does not know how to play it smoothly whatsoever. His attempts at seductive looks come off like squinty eyed drunken mirror staring contests. Also, if we are just being frank, he doesn’t look the part at all! One can understand Tom Berenger’s sex appeal, but Baldwin? Really? In what world.
Sliver has a lot of sex, but not sexual chemistry whatsoever. In an Entertainment Weekly article from 1993 (which is on the Internet so credit to their archiving ability) it was reported that Stone had to be coerced and convinced to join the project. With already lackluster interest, she had to work with Baldwin, who was new to Hollywood. As a rookie in the game, Baldwin was getting input from all different directions, and Stone is on record saying that he was trying too hard and swimming in too deep of water.
In the years after Sliver, there were rumors that Sharon Stone detested Baldwin. There were specific rumors that Stone bit Baldwin while kissing so much so that he could barely talk properly. In a 2021 article in The New Yorker she clarified that she never did such a thing, and the reported resentment between the pair was overblown.
Hatred or not, it is undeniable that there is no chemistry between the two stars. That lack of pomp ensures that Sliver crawls towards its unceremonious finish line. The ending had to be reshot countless times due to poor audience test screens and yet the final product still doesn’t leave any impact at all. When Sliver ends, the sensation of the audience is one of relief. Similar to when a shard of wood gets stuck in your finger. Yea, I am ending it on this horrendous comparison. The movie doesn’t deserve any better.
If you do want to watch Sliver, it is streaming on Paramount+.
STANKO RATING: F+
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