Mindhunters Review

Christian Slater and Val Kilmer need to sit down and have a long, serious talk with their agents. Granted, neither has exactly been on a career high lately, but being a name actor in a picture like this has to sting. “Mindhunters” is essentially Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” shoehorned into a modern day setting, and told as a slasher movie. This unnecessarily brutal whodunnit was directed by the once mighty (but always crappy) Renny Harlin, the guy who used to direct most of the big dumb overblown action A-pictures a decade ago (“Cliffhanger”, “Die Hard 2”). O, how the mighty have fallen – Harlin now has the distinction of following last year’s infamous do-over of Paul Schrader’s “Exorcist” prequel with this gory dud, which apparently has been sitting on the shelf complete for over a year and a half. (Shock and dismay.)

For those unfamiliar with Christie’s original classic mystery, the basic idea is that ten individuals are stuck together in a shared situation. The cast thins quickly as bodies continue to turn up. Who is doing the killing, or why is next-to-impossible to solve. In this case, the ten individuals are F.B.I. psychological profilers in training, stuck by themselves on an abandoned funhouse-like island-turned-training facility. Each trainee is anxious to prove him or herself, but when the initially phony danger turns very real, they have to use their budding skills to second-guess each other. Is it the buff government official (LL Cool J), strangely sent along to observe the trainer’s (Kilmer) unconventional methods? Is it the unconventional trainer himself, the only guy who is obviously off his rocker? Or what about Slater’s character, who is clearly too old to be a trainee, compared to the rest of the group. (Not that that’s ever acknowledged on screen. But I’m sure some will entertained by the sight of his chiseled bod in a very gratuitous shower scene.) Of course, this being a slasher movie in disguise, there’s also the naïve and timid girl who must prove herself – one way or another. The rest of the cast of Jello-mold pretty-boys and a sexy babe blend together into a non-descript blur of well-armed forced attitude and posturing. All the while, theories and accusations clutter the air as suspects continue to drop.

It isn’t Harlin’s propensity for shocking gore that tanks this effort. “Mindhunters”, like some of the director’s more recent work, does contain a few satisfying visceral moments, that, good taste aside, do make audiences jump. (The goofy-yet-cinematically-original city street Formula One car chase in “Driven” comes to mind.) For that reason, many less discriminating viewers will be plenty happy with this movie. But for those of us who demand more, “Mindhunters” proves to be a hollow husk, adorned with clumsy fight scenes and dingy Fincher-esque settings. The film is guilty of a number of things, but it is its anti-payoff that truly deems it a waste of time. Harlin and company try to take a page from the modern day twist-ending playbook, revealing the true killer and how the crimes were accomplished in a quick montage of recycled footage while telling us the answer was right in front of us all along. Bullcrap. Like any mystery, good or bad, red herrings abound in regard to all characters. As we move toward the final fade out, numerous characters are falsely and briefly revealed to the killer, and in this movie the same montage technique would work just as well with them if they really were the one. Watching “Mindhunters”, I wish it would’ve just wrapped up with the first accusation, so then I could’ve been done with it all the sooner.

Perhaps the only good to come of this film is its apparent signaling of the end of Renny Harlin’s career as an A-list director. It’s been a long time coming, and how he got funding for any projects beyond “Cutthroat Island” I’ll never know, but his particular brand of silver screen gruel is officially dead. “Mindhunters”, after years of sitting on its distributor’s shelf, will finally see the light of wide release days before “Star Wars: Episode III” comes along and sends it to its rightful home as a forgotten title on DVD shelves. Not only is this film an overdressed gorefest parading as a legitimate mystery-gone-“C.S.I.”, “Mindhunters” is a mindless repackaging of a classic story, painfully hunting for ideas of how to jar viewers.

- Jim Tudor