WARNING: minor SPOILERS within
When the movie opens with a good sequence, which later turns out to be a "training mission", you know you're in for one of 'those' movies. Mindhunters is, basically, Final Destination, meets D-Tox, meets Five Dolls for an August Moon, meets Deep Blue Sea. It's about a team of FBI agents that are dispatched to an island to complete a training mission. OK, in D-Tox it wasn't a training mission, but it's still more or less the same. While there, it becomes apparent that one of them is a serial killer amongst them, a la Five Dolls for an August Moon, that is killing them off in a series of over the top traps, much like the ones seen in Final Destination. It's surprising just how sure the filmmakers are that people won't have seen the Italian horror film; Five Dolls, as an entire sequence involving coffee and sleeping pills is entirely ripped off from that movie. Mindhunters also subscribes to the Deep Blue Sea school of killing off your big actors near the start, thereby lowering the cost of hiring them while retaining the benefit of being able to put "Val Kilmer" and "Christian Slater" on the movie poster.
Yes, it is Val Kilmer's name that you see sprawled across the top of the poster, but in actual fact he only appears for a mere 10 minutes or so. Also worth noting is the Hellraiser rip-off on his demise...are we noticing a pattern here? Christian Slater also has very little screen time considering how highly billed he is. His death scene is fairly decent, however; even if it is a rip-off of Terminator 2, and it's extremely implausible. A lot of the death scenes are fairly imaginative, but it seems that most of them are just trying to be as over the top as possible, without worrying about whether or not they are realistic. For example; there is a scene in which a woman is killed by ingesting smoke from a cigarette that has been soaked in acid. What doesn't make sense is...why didn't the cigarette melt when the acid touched it? In fact, the film is riddled with plot holes, that is just one of them.
The plot is based on a fairly good idea, however. The FBI people in the film are competing to become a 'profiler', which is basically someone that decides what type of person a serial killer is, judging by their method of killing. The killer in this movie uses this skill to exploit his victims by setting a trap that he knows they will walk into. "Are we really that predictable?" seems to be the question of the film, which is admirable because at least it has a question to ask. Despite stealing nearly everything about it's plot, and being, in effect; a labyrinth of borrowed items and ridiculous plot holes, Mindhunters does manage to be entertaining for it's duration. The film is not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it is worth seeing if you haven't got anything better to do, like I didn't when I watched it.
When the movie opens with a good sequence, which later turns out to be a "training mission", you know you're in for one of 'those' movies. Mindhunters is, basically, Final Destination, meets D-Tox, meets Five Dolls for an August Moon, meets Deep Blue Sea. It's about a team of FBI agents that are dispatched to an island to complete a training mission. OK, in D-Tox it wasn't a training mission, but it's still more or less the same. While there, it becomes apparent that one of them is a serial killer amongst them, a la Five Dolls for an August Moon, that is killing them off in a series of over the top traps, much like the ones seen in Final Destination. It's surprising just how sure the filmmakers are that people won't have seen the Italian horror film; Five Dolls, as an entire sequence involving coffee and sleeping pills is entirely ripped off from that movie. Mindhunters also subscribes to the Deep Blue Sea school of killing off your big actors near the start, thereby lowering the cost of hiring them while retaining the benefit of being able to put "Val Kilmer" and "Christian Slater" on the movie poster.
Yes, it is Val Kilmer's name that you see sprawled across the top of the poster, but in actual fact he only appears for a mere 10 minutes or so. Also worth noting is the Hellraiser rip-off on his demise...are we noticing a pattern here? Christian Slater also has very little screen time considering how highly billed he is. His death scene is fairly decent, however; even if it is a rip-off of Terminator 2, and it's extremely implausible. A lot of the death scenes are fairly imaginative, but it seems that most of them are just trying to be as over the top as possible, without worrying about whether or not they are realistic. For example; there is a scene in which a woman is killed by ingesting smoke from a cigarette that has been soaked in acid. What doesn't make sense is...why didn't the cigarette melt when the acid touched it? In fact, the film is riddled with plot holes, that is just one of them.
The plot is based on a fairly good idea, however. The FBI people in the film are competing to become a 'profiler', which is basically someone that decides what type of person a serial killer is, judging by their method of killing. The killer in this movie uses this skill to exploit his victims by setting a trap that he knows they will walk into. "Are we really that predictable?" seems to be the question of the film, which is admirable because at least it has a question to ask. Despite stealing nearly everything about it's plot, and being, in effect; a labyrinth of borrowed items and ridiculous plot holes, Mindhunters does manage to be entertaining for it's duration. The film is not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it is worth seeing if you haven't got anything better to do, like I didn't when I watched it.