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PLOT: A group of young trainee FBI serial-killer "profilers" are marooned on an island as a training exercise, and find they themselves are being profiled and stalked by a killer.
Some immigrants learn the language from watching TV. I'm convinced that Finnish-born Hollywood schlockmeister Renny Harlin did it by absorbing movie cliches. His first two words in English may have been "red herring."
Exhibit A for this theory is Mindhunters, an ankle-deep lost-opportunity of a thriller in which characters are not so much people as plot devices. It is, in fact, merely a slasher film with clueless young, pretty FBI agents instead of clueless, pretty teens, bickering as they get picked off one by one.
How do you keep this limiting dynamic going for the hour and a half-plus apparently required by law? Simple. You switch the focus of suspicion every few minutes, only to reveal that your latest suspect himself has been killed. If this sounds funny, it often is. What worked a long time ago in Ten Little Indians is pure comedy gold in the hands of hacks.
Mindhunters, which has been "on the shelf" for a while, opens with young serial-killer profilers-in-training getting raked over the coals by their tough, eccentric instructor Harris (Val Kilmer). It should be noted that the marquee names in the movie, Kilmer and Christian Slater (who plays the leader of the FBI kids), are there for about 10 minutes each -- not a good sign.
The gang includes an easily frightened blonde (in slasher films she'd be Jamie Lee Curtis or Heather Langenkamp) named Sara (Kathryn Morris), a Texan (Jonny Lee Miller), a Brit (Will Kemp), a tough guy in a wheelchair (Clifton Collins), a wiseacre (Eion Bailey) and a fiery Latina (Patricia Velazquez).
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With their evaluations on the line, the gang is sent to a mysterious island the FBI shares with the Navy, there to go through their paces in realistic serial-killer setups (and joined by a mysterious police detective, played by LL Cool J).
Within minutes of their first "drill," one of their number is killed in a complicated Rube Goldberg fashion. Our little law-enforcement Breakfast Club is thus forced to "profile" their stalker to save themselves.
The problem is, there's very little brain on display. For the most part, they holler and point guns at each other as suspicion shifts from person to person on a whim. If these are the FBI's best brains, no wonder so many crimes go unsolved.
In the end, good old-fashioned guns and punchups are the crime-stoppers of choice. And, of course, no ostensible bad guy goes down without getting up again.
A few murders on Boobytrap Island are imaginative, including one with a tank of liquified gas that leaves the victim "breakable," and another that truly underlines the dangers of smoking.
But in the end, idiocy conquers all. Don't even try to figure out how the real killer could have pulled off the byzantine deathtraps in the movie. If the filmmakers won't waste the brainpower, why should you?
(This film is rated 14-A)