INSTINCT

***

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding Jr, Donald Sutherland, Maura Tierney

Director: Jon Turteltaub

Rating: M

Reviewer: Graham Reid

Part Gorillas In The Mist, part One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (and with enough resonances of Silence Of The Lambs to be noticeable), this slightly overlong and disappointing vehicle for Hopkins and Gooding fails to deliver on what is a potentially interesting story.

Hopkins (in Sean Connery's wig from The Rock) is the brilliant primatologist Ethan Powell, who has disappeared for two years into the jungles of Rwanda while studying mountain gorillas.

Brought back to Miami in manacles (Hannibal comes to The Rock) after killing two Rwandans, he is effectively mute and extremely violent, and so is placed, heavily sedated, with the criminally insane in a brutal prison.

Gooding, as the ambitious psychiatrist Theo Caulder, is assigned the case by his mentor, Ben Hillard (Sutherland reprising his now standard turn as white-haired patrician intellectual), and attempts to break through Powell's wall of sullen silence to uncover the source of his violence.

As the somewhat predictable plot unfurls - it gives nothing away to say Powell lived with the great apes and "found himself" and the true nature of man in their midst - Instinct shifts its ground.

As Caulder bucks traditional practice in the prison, it becomes the familiar stand-off between authority and interloper, yet attempts also - when Powell opens up, which he does alarmingly quickly - to probe what makes man so different from the peaceful primates of our ancestry.

But it's also Anthro 101 - Powell's conclusion that man is descended from a more violent tribe of great apes is hardly the stuff which required deep immersion. Oddities also abound: there's a joke about Sigourney Weaver (who, you'll recall, played Dian Fossey in Gorillas), and Tierney, as Powell's daughter, handles a cigarette so badly in one scene you can only assume it was, if not product placement, then certainly implanting the idea of smoking.

When Powell retreats back into silence he becomes less the metaphor the filmmaker wanted than Chief in Cuckoo's Nest.

But while Gooding brings increasing depth to his character, Hopkins settled early for the troubled gravitas he does so well, and it was down to the excellent support (among them George Dzundza as the burned-out prison psychiatrist and John Ashton as the uncompromising, hardened guard who sees his control slipping away) to create the necessary atmosphere in a film which attempts to probe various hearts of darkness in man.

Interesting enough but ultimately unsatisfying.