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Anthony Hopkins is a brilliant actor; Cuba Gooding Jr. is a talented guy with a lot of charm. Both have recently won Oscars (Best Actor for
The Silence of the Lambs and Best Supporting Actor for
Jerry Maguire, respectively); neither can make
Instinct compelling. Hopkins plays a brilliant anthropologist studying gorillas who entered into their world, becoming part of their family, and who killed two park rangers in the gorillas' habitat. Gooding plays a brilliant young psychiatrist who's supposed to evaluate Hopkins and determine whether he's fit to stand trial. Hopkins, along with a number of other psychotics, is being held at a prison, which serves to illustrate the movie's themes about control and freedom. It's not so much that the ideas themselves are hokum--nature versus civilization is always a rich topic--it's that
Instinct boils them down to inane sound bites. Psychology is reduced to a game in which the psychiatrist's job is to trick the patient into believing the correct thing or revealing the key that will solve the puzzle. There's not a credible moment in the whole movie, despite the presence of a good cast, including Donald Sutherland (
M*A*S*H,
Klute,
Without Limits, and many, many others) and Maura Tierney (TV's
Newsradio).
--Bret Fetzer
Anthony Hopkins plays a distinguished anthropologist who lives happily amid the mountain gorillas of Rwanda but goes ape when some rogue park rangers try to eliminate the peaceful furry beasts. Several years later, he's stuck in a ward for the criminally insane in a Florida prison, and Cuba Gooding, Jr., a hot-shot young psychiatrist, tries to spring him. It seems that the anthropologist, despite his violent habits, is a deeply moral man with a Rousseauian take on the corruptions of civilization and the benevolence of life in a state of nature. This unfortunate rubbish, written by Gerald DiPego (from a novel by Daniel Quinn) and directed by Jon Turteltaub, preaches against violence while attempting to excite us with the peculiar spectacle of Hopkins bashing people twice his size. The only pleasurable element in it is the performance of Gooding, whose charm and intelligence, products of high civilization, neatly undermine everything the filmmakers are trying to say. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
