An extreme case of a naturalist going ape. This one had to be a producers dream going in. Sir Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr., both Academy Award winning actors in the two lead roles. A terrific novel as the basis for the screenplay. A director (Jon Turtletaub) who makes commercially successful movies like Phenomenon, While You Were Sleeping and Cool Runnings. In spite of all of these positive factors, Instinct was a bomb of epic proportions. Budgeted at 55 million, its US box office gross through August 15th was just under 34 million.

I went to see Instinct on a Saturday night, one of those "sneak preview" things that are usually packed. This one was. The "buzz" that I heard after it was over was that the two actors really delivered strong performances in their one on one scenes, but that the rest of the movie was slow, cloying, and ultimately, boring.

Hopkins is Dr. Ethan Powell, a renowned scientist who disappeared in Africa while studying gorillas. When the movie opens we don't know why he disappeared, only that he is imprisoned for having killed several of the men who tracked him down in the jungle to rescue him. He is ultimately returned to the U.S. and needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist to determine if he can be tried for his crimes.

This evaluation is where Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character, Dr. Theo Calder enters. He is a resident in psychiatry being supervised by Donald Sutherland (Dr. Ben Hillard). Calder begs to be allowed to do this evaluation. It would normally not be a big deal, but Dr. Powell hasn't spoken to anyone since being brought from the jungle. It is in the evaluation scenes that Instinct has its few really strong moments. When Dr. Powell finally deigns to speak to Dr. Calder, it is solely to serve his own purposes. As they develop a rapport, you can see that this really had the potential to go somewhere. When we finally discover that Powell didn't disappear by accident, but had actually been accepted into the group of gorillas as though he was one, and was living among them and studying them from closer than any person had ever had the opportunity, we begin to understand why he is the way he is. I cannot say more without giving away too much of the plot.

But the subplots (trouble in the prison where Hopkins is being housed, a potential romance between Calder and Powell's daughter) just don't work. When the film is viewing those rather than looking at Powell struggling, torn between the world of man and the world of the apes, it bogs down. Ultimately, it loses the audience.