Instinct

Name: Instinct
Genre: Drama
Released: June 4, 1999
Duration: 126 min
Rating: 43
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding Jr.

1999

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Mixed or average reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 18 Ratings

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6.7

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6.7	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 18 Ratings

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Movie Details & Credits

Buena Vista Pictures | Release Date: June 4, 1999 | R

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Summary: Set in a maximum-security prison, a psychiatrist (Gooding) examines an anthropologist (Hopkins) who was retrieved from the African jungles where he had lived for several years amongst the apes.

Director: Jon Turteltaub

Genre(s): Drama

Rating: R

Runtime: 126 min

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Critic Reviews

Andrew O'Hehir

Although Instinct is strictly a Hollywood formula picture, it's such an efficiently executed one, built around two such outstanding actors, that for the most part you won't mind. Read full review

David Edelstein

The more subversive Instinct gets in proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department. Read full review

Lawrence Van Gelder

The medium is more palatable than the saccharine message because Hopkins and Gooding know how to put on a show. Read full review

Rita Kempley

A sloppily structured, snoozily paced psychodrama about living in harmony with nature and all the rest of that tree-hugging hooey. Read full review

John Anderson

A greatest-hits collection of plot devices and emotional cues from such films as "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," making it something of a trained chimp, one that apes a lot of good movies while making itself look ridiculous. Read full review

Peter Rainer

In the end, Powell thanks his doctor for sharing the journey, but audiences who sit through this zoologically daft back-to-nature clinker may feel far less charitable. Read full review

TV Guide Magazine Maitland McDonagh

In search of inspiration and the human spirit triumphant, they managed to cook up a pot of sanctimonious, reductive claptrap (which the credits confess was only "inspired" by Quinn's book) that's not in the least instructive or entertaining. Read full review

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User Reviews

CooterPatooter

Feb 21, 2012

Come on now... as much as they might try to disguise it, this is just a vehicle to make Anthony Hopkins play another Hannibal Lecter-esque character. Not bad but I'll bet there's no more than a handful of folks in the world who's seen it more than once.

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