Starring: Eion Bailey, Clifton Collins Jr., Will Kemp, Val Kilmer, Jonny Lee Miller Directed By: Renny Harlin Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC Label: Dimension Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: September 20, 2005 Running Time: 106 minutes Theatrical Release Date: May 13, 2005
Description: The government's best and brightest discover there is a killer among them in this intense psychological action-thriller featuring hot screen stars LL Cool J (S.W.A.T., ANY GIVEN SUNDAY) Val Kilmer (ALEXANDER, BATMAN FOREVER, TOP GUN), and Christian Slater (WINDTALKERS, ALONE IN THE DARK). An elite group of the FBI's most talented young profilers -- agents skilled in reading the minds of the most elusive serial killers -- is being intensively trained on a remote island. But they soon learn that someone who has been taught to capture serial killers has become one ... and there may be no way out alive! Also starring Kathryn Morris (MINORITY REPORT, TV's COLD CASE) and Jonny Lee Miller (DRACULA 2000, MANSFIELD PARK), this riveting thrill ride comes to you from hit-making director Renny Harlin (EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING, CLIFFHANGER, DIE HARD 2)!
Amazon.com: Creepy, tense, and enigmatic, Renny Harlin's Mindhunters is a grisly cross between Agatha Christie's whodunit classic And Then There Were None and Jonathan Demme's horrifying The Silence of the Lambs. An interesting ensemble cast, including Christian Slater (Windtalkers), Jonny Lee Miller (Melinda and Melinda), L.L. Cool J (Harlin's Deep Blue Sea), and Kathryn Morris (television's Cold Case) portray promising FBI profilers-in-training. Val Kilmer plays their ambiguous instructor putting the candidates through their paces and leaving them for a weekend on a spooky island, where those who survive a terrifying exercise--penetrating the mind of a serial killer via elaborate clues--will go to the head of the class. The rules change, however, when the students themselves turn out to be victims, bumped off one after another, the survivors half-mad with suspicion and paranoia that the murderer is one of their own. The film's concept is sound even if the execution (so to speak) gets out of hand with problems of logic. Among other things, none of these characters could possibly find time to pull off some of the psychopath's more complicated killing rituals. Quibbles aside, however, Mindhunters is particularly watchable if one is in the mood for a movie that plays mind games. --Tom Keogh
Mind Hunters This movie is trying way too hard to be clever and stylish.
On the clever side, it fails badly with all the logic mistakes. There is no way that any of the FBI trainees could have set up these elaborate traps on the fly. Then, while these are highly trained profilers, once under pressure, they stop doing their highly sophisticated profiler talk and instead fall back into the stereotype Hollywood movie trapped prey behavior of shutting off their brain and just accusing the next person of being the killer without thought or reason.
On the stylish side, I thought the soundtrack was getting in the way of making this a serious suspense movie, instead turning it into an MTV extreme sport feature. Val Kilmer and Christian Slater have actually very short appearances in this film, maybe they thought it better to leave the sinking ship. The remaining actors are mostly two-dimensional, and instead of acting scared (which they should have been) or at least disturbed, they mostly go their ways like it is still an exercise and they will come out unscathed.
If the traps hadn't been so elaborate (and thus unbelievable), this could have been decent entertainment. If the music had been more supporting of the moods, the stylish factor would have been adequate. If the actors had been reacting like humans, this could have risen beyond B material.
Mindhunters - Synopsis and Review The Not-Too-Revealing Synopsis:
A class of elite FBI students are given mock crimes to analyze and profile. When a test becomes dangerous the students start to question their teacher and each other.
Review:
The scenario drew my interest: a whole group of promising mindhunters working together. The possibilities were many - who will they take on? what could a group do that a single profiler could not? Disappointingly a bulk of the movie takes place in one limited location and the group-possiblity is never played out. It is completely a guess-the-bad-guy kind of movie with a score of misdirections and twists thrown in. If you enjoy guessing at who done it and what will happen next then it is a thrilling movie. The dangers and scenarios are implausible and simply do not make sense in the context of the characters and their professions though so you will ruin it for yourself if question the plot or characters on any level. I would not suggest watching it if you are only interested in seeing Val Kilmer or Christian Slater as their screen time is limited. The other characters were not especially interesting and I think the director failed in their development.
Thriller or a cop story Very disapointing film with two major stars in it: Val Kilmer and Christian Slater. But not even these two actors can save hopeless plot of the movie. This is supposed to be a story of FBI profilers (about a dozen of them) preparing for the drill on deserted island. Before long, they notice that their excercise is turning into real fight for survival. One of them is a killer, only no one knows who it is. As each profilers is offed every 5 minutes in the very innovative way (no two murders are the same and some are quite psychopatic), we are kept at the edge of our seat trying to figure out which one is the real killer. Moral of the story - even the FBI can let a sociopath slip into their ranks...Unless you are in the mood to waste your time, do not watch this movie.
Who morally is the real killer and the real gun? Such a film is to be discovered directly. There is no possible summarizing it without destroying its force and its effect. Let's say seven young FBI agents are being trained to become profilers. The teacher is harsh with them because he seems to find them too weak. The last test is to drop them on a totally abandoned and deserted island announcing there is a serial killer with them. And they have three or four days to profile him or her, and what's more they have a chaperon from the Department of Justice. Good luck, Good bye and Good adventure ahead. And they discover very fast there is a serial killer among them, but they do not know who. And there everything goes wrong for them. Thank you Agatha Christie and her "Ten Little N****s" (sorry we cannot quote the real word in politically correct English, can we?), or "Murder By Death" used as models. The details are in the film. The film demonstrates how these young agents have none of the necessary qualities to become profilers, and particularly the capacity to remain cool, cold and self controlled if they don't want to fall in the traps the serial killer is laying in front of them. And lose their cool they all will, dramatically and pay for their mistake with their lives. But the best profiler of them all is absent, it is the teacher who had profiled the serial killer among them and knew this one will not stop at anything at all to be the only one to survive and get the degree. But we could wonder if that is not a subtle way of being a killer too: by using the unconscious and unsolicited services of a real killer to prove his point: these young people are not serious future profilers and have to be eliminated. And that brings the film to the level of a metaphor of society. Only the best one survives any test, or the survivor of an elimination game is the best one. True or False? The film leans towards true. I think it could have been slightly more subtle.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
A little over the top I had no idea what this movie was about for about the first 20 minutes, because it focused on creating a back-story before the overall plot took place.
Then when the movie got going, I was confused on what was going on.
I think the movie could have been better without the first 45 minutes, because that just throws you off completely.
And the rest was a blur, because I had zoned out completely before the climax.
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