Anthony Hopkins is Dr. Ethan Powell, a guy who disappeared from society and ended up living with some gorillas in Africa. When we meet Hopkins he is being transported from an African jail back home to Florida. It seems he killed two people and wounded three others and then refused to talk about it. The spooky tone of the film establishes the film to look a lot like "Silence of the Lambs" and the fact that the Hopkins character takes out a bunch of guards at the airport enforces the fact that he's ruthless, dangerous, but still very suave.
It's decided that he's in need of psychiatric evaluation and Donald Sutherland is assigned the task. For no apparent reason, however, he turns the case over to his young protégé Theo Caulder, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. So Cuba goes off to jail to "evaluate" Hopkins, but even as he strides across the prison roof, you know that the journey of Cuba is embarking on, will be to find his own soul.
And Cuba's journey into the ultimate good of humanity is not the only obvious part of the movie. After just a few scenes you pretty much know what is going to happen, when, where, and why. And it does.
"Instinct," therefore, is a rather odd movie. Neither good nor bad, it simply is. Hopkins doesn't pull much out of the hat for the role, he just kind of goes with the aged man with all the answers option. Cuba is his usual lively self, in a role that suggests society has shown him the money--or at least set him on the path to get it--but now Hopkins sets him on a more altruistic path.
The supporting cast are a hodge podge collection of stereotypes that might be put together to allow Cuba to utter one or two good lines. It's very easy to identify, for example, which stereotypical character is which with just a quick glance around the first prison scene. Even the gorilla scenes are rather tame and lame.
If you saw the adds for "Instinct" you may think it's a very different kind of movie to the actual product. The adds suggest a psychological thriller, whereas the film is really a touchy feely thing that hammers home the message that society is troubled and we humans need to seek truth and peace elsewhere.