Instinct

Instinct

List Price: $3.97
Our Price: $3.93
You Save: $6.02 (60%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $3.29 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD details

DVD details

• Anthony Hopkins plays a psychiatrist studying apes in Africa, when he disappears for two years. Soon after he is accused of murder and sent back to the States where he is placed in a mental institution. Cuba Gooding, Jr plays a psychologist assigned to his case. System Requirements: Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding Jr., John Ashton, George Dzundza, Donald Sutherland, and Maura Tierney.

DVD Reviews of Instinct

DVD Review: absurd psychodrama
Summary: 1 Stars

Hopkins stars as a research anthropologist who abandons family, home and, eventually, sanity to take up residence, Sigourney Weaver-style, with a family of apes that, of course, just welcome him fully into their ersatz anthropoid family unit. While he's making nicey-nice with the gorillas, a band of hunters attacks the camp, killing most of their number, a crime for which he is returned to the states in a strange state of self-imposed silence. Gooding jr. plays the crack psychiatrist assigned to work with this violently deranged man and attempt to draw the truth from him about what really happened in the deep dark jungles of Africa.

Any movie that begins with the cerebral Hopkins singlehandedly demolishing an entire airport terminal, while scores of armed guards struggle to subdue him, is not destined to register high on the credibility meter. The screenplay, in fact, degenerates into a snail-paced series of increasingly ludicrous confrontations between the deranged killer and the doctor, wherein the psychiatrist, predictably, is set straight on some eternal verities by the psychotic truth teller. How often must we be subjected to this idiotic notion that all therapists are really only trying to work out their own redemptions and that the deeply emotionally disturbed patients somehow possess the requisite wisdom we mere rational mortals do not to help them achieve this? The film trods this tried-and-true path right up to a thoroughly wretched final scene that defies all credibility and lapses completely into the absurd. At one point, to achieve his redemption, Gooding Jr. rallies the psychotic prisoners to band together and stand up against the tyrranical prison forces arrayed against them - in a scene filled with the kind of phony emotional uplift that is always backed up by a swelling, sobbing orchestral composition and endless shots of characters looking meaningfully upward in teary-eyed pride and determination. If only Jack Nicholson had had such an advocate!

Cuba Gooding Jr., though he certainly tries hard, lacks the gravitas necessary to carry off a leading role of this magnitude, and Hopkins provides his customary grating mannerisms as he lectures us about the virtues of uncivilized, primitive Man. "Instinct" is thoroughly derivative yet it does have the chutzpah to make momentary fun of itself by including Sigourney Weaver as the butt of a one-liner. It is the one moment of cleverness, honesty and courage in an otherwise dull, incredible and utterly uninteresting film.

Description of Instinct