Hopkins plays Ethan Powell, a distinguished primatologist who`s been extradited from Rwanda, where he apparently went berserk and killed several people. Arriving at an American prison in chains to await trial, he refuses to talk to anyone, even his daughter, Maura Tierney. Theo Caulder, Cuba Gooding Jr., an ambitious young psychiatrist, is assigned to try to break through to the seemingly mad scientist... Instinct has its heart in the right place, but it`s an intensely irritating film.
It`s a mystery why Anthony Hopkins ever took such a role, especially as the scenes in which, manacled, he broods in his prison cell - he looks like Hannibal Lecter on a bad hair day. It`s obvious from the very beginning what`s happened, but the long-winded screenplay takes an interminable amount of time to reveal what we knew all along. And this is one of those films which doesn`t stand the scrutiny of any kind of analysis; the motivations just don`t make sense. The prison guards are impossibly brutal and nasty, the prisoners look as if they`ve stepped out of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, and Cuba Gooding Jr`s earnestness is exceptionally grating.
Above all, director Jon Turteltaub, who made heavy weather of Phenomenon with John Travolta, has turned what possibly could have been an interesting psychological drama on a noble theme into an unsubtle, bleeding obvious, crashing bore.
