Talk about "Mindhunters" here:
Review by: Breanne Derby
Plot Summary
A group of eight FBI criminal profilers in training are working on one final "lesson in teamwork" on an island off of the United States East coast. On the first morning when their simulation is to begin, things take a much more grave tone when one of the Mindhunters is killed. At first the rest of them begin searching for a criminal left on the island, but quickly they begin to suspect one another. As the body count is growing higher and time is running out, it is up to the remaining Mindhunters to figure out just who the killer is, and stop the rest of them from dying.
Review
The goal of this film is very obviously to keep the viewer guessing. Having eight main characters allows for a lot of them to be killed before the film ends. In the "Making of…" video that was in the special features the director, Renny Harlin, said that he tried not to focus too much on one character to give the audience the feeling that "anyone could die at any moment," but as a viewer I found that there was a character who was more main than the rest and would not die in the end.
With this type of film, the "fun" of the movie is trying to figure out who the killer is, and many people get upset when the film stumps them and dub it a bad movie. Ironically, the same people who deem movies bad when they are outwitted by them also deem movies bad when the killer is obvious from the beginning, calling them "too predictable." The heinous label of "too predictable" is what causes films like Mindhunters to be made. This film stumped me. I did not predict who the killer was. I am not ashamed that I was fooled by Mindhunters, but it was a bad film in spite of the fact that I didn't figure it out.
In a glorious attempt to escape the label of "too predictable," Mindhunters has the oft-used twist at the end. Not only does the film twist once, it twists three times.
The dialogue in this film was exceptionally corny and awful. Some of the worst of it was delivered by LL Cool J in his role as Gabe Jensen. Just one of the lines said in complete seriousness was "eeny, meanie, miney, mo, who's the next [person] to go."
The special effects in this film were minimal, but incredibly bad as well. Early on, one of the characters is frozen to death (assumedly with liquid nitrogen though the container that it's in says "helium") and falls over and breaks into large pieces (sorry to spoil that, it's not that good anyway and it's really early in the film) and that was some of the worst CGI I've ever seen. Once the "helium" got on the character, things began to look incredibly fake, and when the character fell, the pieces were exceptionally phony looking as well.
In spite of all of its shortcomings, this film is very involving for the viewer. I didn't have a chance to learn all of the characters names before they started dying, and after they did I started diagramming who was who and when they died in my notebook. If nothing else, the viewer was trying to figure out who the killer was. I personally wasn't focused on finding out who it was as much as attempting to predict who was going to die next.
Conclusion
This film was unbelievably far-fetched. It is difficult to explain how things went on without revealing too much for those of you who might still want to see it. There was no possible way the killer could have had enough time to set up all of the traps that the Mindhunters were snared in. I probably wouldn't watch this film again. I don't generally enjoy "thriller" or "slasher" films, and this one was no exception.
