Mindhunters

Director: Renny Harlin
Writer: Wayne Kramer
Val Kilmer
Christian Slater
Jonny Lee Miller
LL Cool J
Kathryn Morris

Plot: Seven FBI profilers are taken to a secluded island by their maverick instructor to isolate them and give a real world test of their profiling skills. The tables are turned as they realize that the exercise becomes a real life manhunt for a serial killer.

Review: I first saw the preview for this movie around the end of 2003 and was wondering when they were actually going to release the thing. After watching the movie I am pretty confident I know the reason it took over a year to release.

Mindhunters starts off with a pretty promising premise, take 7 ultra intelligent criminal profilers, isolate them and put them in a scenario where they are forced to use their skills to survive. The only problem is I don’t think they knew how to satisfactorily end the movie. The movie is smart, the mystery is solid for the most part, the situations the profilers find themselves in tend to keep a pretty tense plot moving along but, in the end, none of that seemed to matter because all of the careful planning and profiling and such leads to a mess of an ending that really doesn’t depend on what the profilers do and don’t figure out. And you get the feeling that they realized that a little too late in the filming process.

At a time when television shows like CSI, Cold Case (which Kathryn Morris is actually the star), NCIS and various other investigative shows lean heavily on the idea that the investigative process is actually part of the plot and ultimately a large part of the show, Mindhunters clouds these deliberate moments in the film with close up shots, sped up shots, music that doesn’t seem to fit the scene at all and other cinematic effects, re edited into the film to disrupt the continuity. What could have been a pretty intelligent and involving movie to check out just ends up tearing itself apart.

Note: According to IMDB.com a television series named Mindhunters was in production earlier this year and was written by the writer of this movie, Wayne Kramer. I think that this movie could probably work well as a television series as long as they take a cue from other investigative dramas and focus on letting the story unfold in front of its audience.

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