To say that the twists and turns of Mindhunter’s plot are contrived would be akin to describing a river of lava as mildly tepid, and the film’s ending isn’t so much a twist as it is a final twist of the cinematic shiv Harlin has assaulted your brain with. Even a sub-par mystery can be redeemed by a good premise and inventive staging, but Mindhunters carries all the mystique and suspense of a circled Where’s Waldo? Comic. The experience of watching this movie could be no more horrendous had the zombie corpse of Ed Wood risen from the grave to deliver a series of groin kicks directly to your soul.
Mindhunters
Negative Stars
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that a film reviewer’s job is primarily to serve as a cinematic meat shield, taking an endless barrage of Hollywood bullets to protect you, the discerning moviegoer from the theatrical equivalent of a drive by shooting. Needless to say, no amount of Kevlar could protect me from the soul-crushing assault of Renny Harlin’s Mindhunters.
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| Hate life? This one’s for you! |
Posing as the nth variation of locked-room mystery classic 10 Little Indians, Mindhunters attempts to make its mark on the serial killer genre by having the characters/victims be forensic pathologists, those specialized investigators who deal with predicting the behavior of killers. While this might have made for an interesting pitch, the combined cast and crew have delivered yet another unmemorable crime thriller that wouldn’t look out of place in the Clearance DVD bin. If the FBI’s investigators mental prowess were on par with the characters in this clumsy thriller, America would soon be over-run by an army of mass murderers and Rube Goldberg-obsessed maniacs.
Christian Slater and Val Kilmer ‘headline’ a cast so diverse that it might have been conceived by some C-List Benetton Ad generator as a group of wannabe FBI investigators who must pass a final test of their deductive skills by solving a staged serial killing on a training island. As inevitable as the sun rising in the East, the young Turks of Forensic Science soon find themselves up against a real serial killer, who is systematically thinning their ranks like a needlessly complex Darwin through a series of elaborate timed traps and misdirection. Suspicion and tensions run high, as these supposed bright stars of police work pull their guns more than a heroin-crazed Travis Bickle, on both empty hallways and each other.
Who among the cookie-cutter stereotypes will live or die, and who is the killer? Who cares? As any movie-goer can tell you, modern thrillers aren’t about logic and suspense, Hollywood having lazily deciding that imaginative death scenes, vomit inducing editing, and crushing rock fuelled montages must surely be decent substitutes for the genre’s basis in airtight logic and intellectual derring-do.
Slater and Kilmer wisely make early exits from the film, leaving the remaining cast to flounder about among the bloody wreckage of a mystery, of which they do an universally awful job. When LL Cool J is the most convincing member of an elite task force of criminal investigators, one is forced to realize that the remaining film may well be some form of cruel experiment on gullibility and pain tolerance.
Director Renny Harlin’s handling of this film feels like he’s trying to punish those critics who have lambasted his long career of delivering overblown crap to American cinemas. The editing is haphazard as scenes jump around with no sense of location or reason, and the cinematography relies on film-school level flash and bang, with all the flair of a drunken wedding videographer with delusions of grandeur. In one prolonged sequence, you’ll find yourself wondering if perhaps Mindhunters was meant to be shown in 3-D, only the theater forgot to hand out those nifty glasses. Locked room mysteries rely on a claustrophobic knowledge of the surroundings, yet other than a couple of Michael Bay like helicopter shots, we’re never given any sense of scope or locality, and what could have made for an interesting variation on the hunters being hunted is hopelessly forgotten in lieu of cheap shocks and logic-shattering revelations.
To say that the twists and turns of Mindhunter’s plot are contrived would be akin to describing a river of lava as mildly tepid, and the film’s ending isn’t so much a twist as it is a final twist of the cinematic shiv Harlin has assaulted your brain with. Even a sub-par mystery can be redeemed by a good premise and inventive staging, but Mindhunters carries all the mystique and suspense of a circled Where’s Waldo? Comic. The experience of watching this movie could be no more horrendous had the zombie corpse of Ed Wood risen from the grave to deliver a series of groin kicks directly to your soul.
Bring a date.