Instinct. Once you view this film, it becomes clear that Cuba Gooding, Jnr. and Sir Anthony Hopkins didn’t use any of their own instinct to steer well clear of this rubbish.
Cuba Gooding, Jnr, I never liked him, especially when he screamed out “Show me the…” - oh you know what he said. Then that stupid act at the Oscars. “Get off the f**king stage you stupid hack nobody!” is all that went through my brain.
Naturally, someone as goofy looking as Cuba plays the part of a brilliant up and coming psychiatrist, Theo Caulder. Yes, very believable. His boss asks his to research a new case, and when the details of the patient piques his interest he asks to handle the case himself.
Said patient is famed anthropologist, Ethan Powell. Enter Sir Anthony Hopkins. Anthony “I will eat your liver and make sucky sucky tongue noises now give me my frigging award you lousy American fools because I’m British and I make everything sound important and good” Hopkins gets away with murder in this role, literally, because it’s the most clichéd pile of ka-ka of a performance I’ve seen in quite a while. Taking his acting cues from “Mental Patients for Dummies”, his portrayal of a violent murderer who hasn’t spoken a word since his incarceration is sublimely yet stinkily shit.
Let’s face it, he’s clearly a loon. He’s got a long straggly beard and long messy hair. He looks down at the floor. When someone comes close, he’ll try to bite their head off. He’s clearly insane, yes? I’m convinced. If that’s what Hollywood said a loon should look and act like, then who am I to argue? Then, after two very brief interviews, Mr. Show Me Your Balls, Jerry! somehow manages to make a critical breakthrough, and suddenly Hannibal Lecter is his best friend and a mighty civilised and educated one at that, willing to take Gooding on an inner journey of self discovery. No more bitey bitey, no more moody stares at the floor, no more violent outbursts.
Hang on, did I say “an inner journey of self discovery”? Oh f*ck...
At this junction, at this “Inner journey of self discovery“ if you will, my “Shit Film Ahead Warning Radar” started beeping like f*cking mad. Falling to the floor grasping my head while the internal alarm bells shrieked out in my brain, I realised that “Oh no, Lord no! It’s going to be one of those abominations where Gooding will learn something about himself while trying to cure Hopkins. Just kill me right now, please!”
Then, right as rain, the plot turns to gooey mush and all life and semblance of a possibly interesting psycho-drama is driven from it in a hail of “We Want an Oscar” scene chewing. Oh the humanity! The horrible, horrible humanity! The score rises and dips and tries to drag our emotions unwillingly into the tale, deep emotional facial contortions are thrust and flung with abandon from the screen in an effort to trick us into thinking “This is an important movie, dammit! You must love me!”
But it’s not an important movie. Not even close. It’s a shallow, lazily written, shoddily acted, poorly directed heap of turgid tripe which should hang its head in shame and beg forgiveness for so blatantly trying to tell you that your life is wrong, and that that we should all get back to nature and break the bonds of the illusion of freedom which saddle our lives.
After the film, I felt as though I had been treated like a used-up cheap whore. I dragged my pained, emotionally-drained carcass from the lounge chair, fell into bed, and dreamed a dream of the downtrodden and weary. I had fought my fight, beaten my demons and lived to tell, but I was tainted by the depths that stardom would willingly plunge to inflict upon us what they thought would be a tale that should uplift the heart, but instead plunged the soul into an inferno of self-hatred and despair.
Hopkins and Gooding, your journey ends here. You have been judged, and you will serve your time. Use your time in purgatory well, and learn from your errors. Hollywood take note – we are not idiots. Keep serving up this kind of crap and I’ll gladly take up stamp collecting instead.
Instinct sounds fine, with a DD 5.1 audio track at 348kbps to shift the data along from the disc to the player to the receiver down the wires and into your speakers then travelling out into your room until it smacks into the side of your head. Put like that, it’s really quite a journey, isn’t it? Wonderful stuff, really, that we never think about. Where it counts most in this film is within character dialogue, and this comes across clearly and generally without fault. The settings, confined basically to a jungle or mental prison, offers up a little in the way of environment overload, with a little more push for the more dramatic internals or externals, but it’s very quiet and hardly detectable for much of the time which focuses on the one-on-one sparring between Gooding and Hopkins. Not a problem, really, as this film doesn’t require much in the way of establishing the environment too heavily, so I can safely say that it does its job well.
Insipid and manipulative without any redeeming value whatsoever, Instinct struggles vainly to be the kind of film it can never be, but would make a good documentary on how to make your star performers look like desperately overacting apes. Any psychological drama which attempts to sell itself as “...from the hit-making director of Phenomenon and While You Were Sleeping” deserves to be flushed down the toilet with the worst after-effects of last night’s curry.
The picture and sound are both fine, with plenty to recommend them, but it’s a pity that it’s wasted here. Thankfully, there aren’t any extras to suffer through. The final straw would have been a self-congratulatory backslapper commenting on what a fine actor so-and-so is, and how important and deep the film is.
A pox on them all!
