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Making movies isn't like making biscuits, a reasonably forgiving recipe where you can throw the ingredients together in more or less the proper amounts, bake at approximate temperature and time, and be assured of at least nominal success. Films are created by a process, like soufflé: select, blend, whisk, sift, fold, stir, pour, separate, decant, and everything can be going perfectly until somebody slams the kitchen door and you're left with a really time-consuming pancake. Instinct is one of those movies that would seem to have the right components (although, as with food, the fine print can be unappetizing), but something about the way it was put together falls flat.
Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr., plays Dr. Theo Caulder, a gifted, risk-taking psychiatric resident looking for a landmark study to impress his mentor (Donald Sutherland) and turn into a book. He requests the case of Ethan Powell (Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins, O.B.E., who always does great crazy), a renowned anthropologist who has remained mute since extradition from Rwanda, where, while studying mountain gorillas, he was imprisoned for bludgeoning to death two park rangers. Heavily medicated and brutalized in the psycho ward of an overcrowded, understaffed Florida prison, Powell seems a really scary shadow of his former self. Now equal parts Howard Hughes and Hannibal Lecter, he's still not too tranquilized to quickly established a reputation as the new resident wild man. After Caulder's usual slick approach almost gets him peeled like a banana, he turns for clues to Powell's daughter Lynn (Maura Tierney, lately the hardest-working woman in Hollywood, having shot several films while still doing "NewsRadio"), who confides that the closer her father became to the objects of his study, the more he withdrew from his family. Confronted with inside info, Ethan finally gets conversational after first putting his supposed inquisitor through a few more trials of his own. In flashback he recounts gradual adoption by a gorilla tribe á la Dian Fossey, their killing by poachers in league with local authorities, and the evolution of his belief that modern civilization, established by "Takers" who pillage nature for quick gratification, is doomed to eventual collapse. In the process the unlikely pair have a marked positive affect on the other inmates, for whom Powell develops a paternal attitude similar to that for the gorillas, and even gain a few small reforms on their behalf, leading to a very unlikely ending.
Whether you call it "Lambs in the Mist," "Silence of the Primates," or "The Ape Man of Alcatraz," Instinct suffers from attempting too many tasks at once. A few of the plot tangents, which include National Geographic exposé, prison reform plea, screwball comedy (several of the minor roles are good-naturedly goofy murderers), family drama, psychological thriller, and environmentalist tract, could have been ditched to the film's benefit, leaving Gooding and Hopkins, whose one-on-one confrontations are often thoroughly gripping, to wield their chops. The script, "suggested" by Daniel Quinn's cult novel Ishmael, about an intelligent gorilla seeking to set mankind straight, does say some interesting things about our place in the grand scheme, but doesn't flow its too many aims together, missing them all as a result. Writer Gerald Di Pego and director John Turteltaub, who previously collaborated on the feelgood New Age parable Phenomenon (although Di Pego's resume also includes a few things such as The Trial of the Incredible Hulk), do deserve some credit for shepherding a better match-up for Hopkins than he got with Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. But they still squandered a couple of the most choice dramatic ingredients going. C
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