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Film review

Don't give 'Mindhunters' a thought

By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 12, 2005

I've been informed that guns can be fired underwater, but that doesn't prevent an anticlimactic showdown in Mindhunters from being the dumbest thing in action movies in a long, long time. It's hard to take a thriller seriously when everything may boil down to a lethal game of Marco Polo.

Mindhunters lost my respect and interest long before that. Maybe it's around the time that a tipped canister of liquid hydrogen turns a big-name star into a shattered Popsicle. Or when a few drags on a cigarette coated with acid causes someone's flesh to bubble from inside and peel away. Or the umpteenth time everyone still alive draws weapons on each other in suspicious standoffs. If only their trigger fingers were a tad itchier.

Mindhunters has been sitting on the shelf for more than two years, but nobody used that time to improve it. The current success of crime scene investigation TV shows is the only logical reason Renny Harlin's movie is escaping now.

The plot involves a group of FBI profilers in training on a final exam field trip to a deserted island Navy base. Their wigged-out instructor (Val Kilmer, channeling Marlon Brando from The Island of Dr. Moreau) sets up a serial killer scenario to solve. Then it's obvious the exercise is real, as bodies and improbabilities pile up. The suspect even has one of those stupid maniac names, the Puppeteer, with grisly corpse signatures to match.

Any of the profilers could be the Puppeteer, and everyone has a reason for the audience to peg them as the killer, until they die. The Puppeteer knows their strengths and weaknesses, plus some obscure American history figuring into the mystery's most far-fetched clue. Screenwriters Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin grasp at more straws than a basket weaver, as if they had no idea who the Puppeteer was before they started typing. Good mystery writers start at the end and work backward to craft a setup. Mindhunters has at least four endings, each coming out of the blue.

But, we get to see Christian Slater smirking for a while, LL Cool J's biceps bulging, Kilmer's overacting and other actors who were probably banking on Mindhunters to be their ticket to stardom in 2003. They still haven't made it, and we understand why.

Grade: D

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast: Val Kilmer, LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Christian Slater, Patricia Velasquez, Kathryn Morris, Clifton Collins Jr., Eion Bailey

Screenplay: Wayne Kramer, Kevin Brodbin

Rating: R; strong violence, harsh profanity, brief sensuality and nudity

Running time: 106 min.

[Last modified May 11, 2005, 09:32:06]