Critic Reviews

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.

A perfect example of how solid directing and good acting can almost redeem a derivative story.

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

Instinct moves along at a competent clip, but it's mostly a tease.

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.

The warning against actors playing with dogs or children should be expanded to include men in gorilla suits.

A mushy-headed, unintentionally funny inspirational drama that plays like a clumsy attempt to crossbreed "The Shawshank Redemption" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

You could be forgiven for thinking -- occasionally -- that you just stumbled into "The Silence of the Apes."

Instinct offers gorillas in the midst of one mediocre movie.

Pardon my pulling anthropological rank, but Instinct -- a movie about an ape-man savant -- seems a quart low on common sense.