An anthropologist (Anthony Hopkins) studying & living amidst gorillas in Ruwanda loses his marbles & slaughters some poachers & ends up in a nuthouse, where a psychiatrist (Cuba Gooding Jr) unlocks the madman's story.
The trailer for Instinct was truly brilliant & looked like the film was going to be a great psycho thriller. But the film turns out to be almost disneyesque in its sentimental syrupiness.
Cuba Gooding Jr sucks bigtime as the shrink & uses cartoony facial expressions in lieu of acting. If I were casting a film I wouldn't show him the money, I'd show him the door. Anthony Hopkins as the sensitive psycho does a great job & the gorilla suits are more convincing than average but it's all wasted in the end.
It also borrows too much from other films, like the escape scene snatched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the scary imprisoned psycho scenes taken from Silence of the Lambs, the Ruwanda scenes including bonding-with-the-idyllic-ape-tribe duplicated from Gorillas in the Mist... Almost everything that unfolded was quickly recognized as a swipe from somewhere else. But man that trailer was impressive.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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