Directed by Jon Turtleltaub
Written by Gerald Di Pego
Based on the novel "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Donald Sutherland, Maura Tierney, George Dzundza, and John Ashton
As Reviewed by James Brundage
The character drama, I think I can safely say, is dead as far as studio films are concerned. Yes, in 1997, we had Gattaca, the interesting tale of a futuristic society in which everyone is genetically engineered, but I haven't seen anything since then. If I racked my mind, I might be able to come up with a few examples of studio films with good characters, but not studio films that are good character dramas. They're long gone.
Whenever a genre dies in studio films, there is a period of time where we experience throwbacks from that genre… films that are attempting to salvage a dying movement in the celluloid medium. With few exceptions, these fail. A prime example: The Mummy, which was an attempt to bring back the adventure style film of the Indiana Jones trilogy. Instinct is yet another throwback.
Instinct -- a movie that comes across as The Shawshank Redemption meets One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest meets Gorillas in the Mist meets Silence of the Lambs -- spends its time trying to be something it can't possibly be: good. Sure, it may be entertaining and, considering the attention span of the average person, it may bring tears to your eyes, but as far as quality goes, Instinct falters.
Instinct follows the intersection of a psychotic killer (Dr. Ethan Powell, played by Anthony Hopkins) playing a game of cat and mouse with a student of psychology (Theo Caulder, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.). Have we not seen this before? Let's change that around a little bit by adding that Powell doesn't eat people… he beats them to death with a club and hangs out with gorillas. Again, we have seen this before. To make it a little less original, we'll throw in a bit about a brutal prison and a brutal insane asylum. Been there, done that.
Instinct, a film that, as near as I can tell, is meant to pose a question about the values of a materialistic society, poses another question for us: have films reached the same level as matter: all engineered parts built on basic units that we understand?
There is nothing new to Instinct and, although I have had four years of this to tell me otherwise, I still hope deep down that originality should be part of my rubric for grading a film. So I am an idealist. It duplicates each one of the aforementioned movies practically shot by shot (i.e. Cuba Gooding, Jr. with his arms outstretched, enjoying the rain and bringing up memories of Tim Robbins' similar performance in The Shawshank Redemption).
Before you start sinking in your seat, please remember that, although the character drama is dead, Instinct did not kill it. Instinct is a character drama. The characters are stock, the situations are hackneyed, and the general impression you get is that the writer was half asleep when he wrote it. Still, Instinct remains moderately enjoyable.
It is funny that I call it this because, this afternoon, I was having a talk with a friend about the people who truly control your tear ducts at a film: the cinematographers and the music composers. With Danny Elfman, an uneducated but highly skilled man behind the keyboard and Philippe Rousselot, cinematographer of A River Runs Through it and Interview with the Vampire behind the camera, you can understand how they play the audience like a fiddle.
They make it as good as it gets, which isn't very good at all.
Sure, the actors doing a top-notch job with bottom-rung roles helps a lot, but were it not for the clean cut score and the pretty images, I may very well have angrily stormed out of the theatre… or tried to incite a riot to rush the screen. But I didn't. It wasn't quite that bad.