Mindhunters Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)January 16th, 2004
MINDHUNTERS
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: B+
Dimension Films
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Written by: Wayne Kramer, story by Wayne Kramer
Cast: Val Kilmer, LL Cool J, Christian Slater, Eion Bailey, Will Kemp, Jonny Lee Miller, Clifton Collins Jr., Kathryn Morris, Patricia Velazquez, Trevor White
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 12/15/03
Do you think you can read people's character by looking at them and their surroundings? For example, you see a couple of people speaking fluent German, toting large bags bearing Lufthansa tags on New York's "A" train. So, you say, they're either Germans on tour or German-Americans returning home. Not bad. But if you discover that they're Germans on tour, does their being here in December mean they're being economical since that wintry months in New York are an off-season, or do you think they're being wise to come here when the city's not crawling with fellow tourists and they can see the real New
York?
There is a way of figuring this out, but you've got to be a good profiler, and good profilers are just what the FBI needs in Renny Harlin's "Mindhunters," a cop story with overtones of horror of the type that Dimension Films loves to distribute. FBI profiling is more complex than the example described above. The agents must look at the crime scene, examine the position of the bodies, look into computer files to see whether similar offenses have been committed in a particular style. A group of these FBI agents who have not yet been accredited as profilers by the chief of the division, Harris (Val Kilmer), are sent on a jag that blows TV reality shows out of the water, a kind of "The Real Cancun" without the bikini babes and with merriment that's not of the social kind but is biting and hostile and fun for the audience if not for the participants.
Gabe Jenkins (LL Cool J), J.D. Reston (Christian Slater), Bobby Whitman (Eion Bailey), Rafe Perry (Will Kemp), Lucas Halpern (Jonny Lee Miller), Vince Sherman (Clifton Collins Jr.), Sarah Moore (Kathryn Morris and Nicole Willis (Patricia Velazquez) are flown by chopper to a deserted, government owned island set up like a huge video game with figures popping up and down begging to be shot, and buses filled with mostly innocent people and at least one terrorist who presumably will be identified by good profilers. The candidates are told that they will be judged according to how quickly and successfully they analyze a set-up crime scene and conjure a profile of the killer.
Unfortunately for the ambitious super-cops, someone is not playing games but picking off the agents, one by one, slowly and methodically, in each case leaving clues just before each assassination. This concentrates the attentions of the crew, because their lives depend on unraveling the mystery before the next person gets shot. Using watches, explosives, and meat hooks favored by slice 'n' dice pics, the mastermind behind the serial killings gets the agents not exactly paranoid because paranoia by definition is an irrational fear but so mistrustful of one another that time after time they draw their guns and point them first on one suspect, then another. What is clear is that someone in the group is a nut job, perhaps a guy who had failed to make the grade on a performance test and needs to get back at the FBI in the harshest manner.
"Mindhunters" is a thriller in every sense of the word, loaded with the usual false alarms (is the guy with a hood over his head really going to kill me, or is he a plant just testing my ability to profile?), more important, though, with so many twists and so many motives possessed by the people on the isle, that "Mindhunters" works just fine as a whodunit as well as a thriller- cum-horror.
Val Kilmer in the role of the head of the project gets only about ten minutes of screen time before he allegedly disappears from the island in the helicopter, allowing each of the frantic agents (except of course, the killer) to suspect the next guy. The methods of execution are graphic. One dude is sprayed with a liquid gas, freezing his body from his feet up, until he is divided like Gaul into three parts. One is hanged on a meat hook. Yet another is shot while a fourth dies from smoking. (Take your rebellious, immortal teenaged son or daughter to the movie to witness that one.)
The concept is not original. After all, Jim Gillespie's film "Eye See You" featured Sylvester Stallone as an FBI agent taunted by a serial killer and James Mangold's "Identity" put seemingly unrelated people in a fleabag motel on a stormy night with a psycho killer on the loose. But originality is difficult at best in a film world that has seem almost all of 'em. The concluding moments are flawed by the usual nonsense of a killer's losing an edge by talking too much while holding a gun on the good guys, but Harlin's movie is well-paced, convincingly performed by actors, each of whom displays a signature quirk, and fills the bill of providing suspense, excitement and mind games.
Rated R. 110 minutes.(c) 2004 by Harvey Karten at
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