Instinct film review

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INSTINCT

The rumble in the jungle in this instance is probably Anthony Hopkins over-acting for all he's worth.

Sporting the crazy, greying locks of all venerable, incarcerated actors, our Tone is Ethan Powell: doctor, primatologist, madman - banged up for an incident in the Rwandan rainforest which left two men dead and several others requiring multiple splints.

Hauled back to America, Powell is now captive in the psycho, wild-starey-eyes wing of Florida's dilapidated and maximum security clink Harmony Bay, under permanent sedation and refusing to breathe a word.

His case is snatched by trainee psychiatrist Theo Calder (Cuba Gooding Jr), a self-confident hotshot who sees his ticket to shrink stardom in the high profile challenge of getting Powell to cough up the events leading to double murder.

But if Powell relinquishes his story, if he unfolds his groundbreaking study in the midst of gorillas, will Calder remain focused on his professional and literary ambitions, or will he too become enveloped by life conducted on very different terms?

In essence two movies finessed by the narrative device of flashback storytelling, this is a well-crafted (if a little showy and pretentious at times) fictional inquiry into one almighty collision between the natural and so-called civilised worlds.

Anchoring the thesping, Hopkins lays down an actorly benchmark and dares Gooding Jr to follow.Without any apparent effort once again, the doctor gone native is fiercely intelligent yet dangerously volatile, and his normally extrovert co-star is forced to match such efforts from within a character considerably more restrained and unemotional than he's used to.

When the action segues to the Rwandan jungle however - lush Jamaican locales on substitute duty - it's Stan Winston's turn to shine. Veterans of pretty much everything visually impressive from Aliens through T2 and Jurassic Park to Mousehunt, Winston and his team have honed their creature effects since the frankly laughable puppets of Congo.

No hint of bloke-in-suit distractions for the gorillas here. No zips, no Velcro, no seams even briefly visible - in fact, so skilled is the facial sculpting and full-size manipulation, that these effects approach the invisible ideal (ie your brain isn't even triggered to applaud them).