DVD Review: Mindhunters

DVD Reviews

By Patrick Luce Sep 17, 2005, 15:40 GMT

The basic premise follows a “Ten Little Indians” type outline and finds the team stranded on a Navy training island, and being killed one by one. They quickly discover that the killer (who sets his traps according to time) is one of them, and spend the rest of the movie in a mad rush to discover his identity before they all end up dead.Since this is a Renny Harlin movie, many of the team wind up dead, and often in brutal, over-the-top ways. Still, the director does a halfway good job of building suspense in between each death, and the actors keep you guessing just which one of them is the bad guy.There are the obvious choices, such as the character in the wheelchair, and the ones that are so obvious that it can’t be them. The plot kind of begins to play out towards the end of the film, and the movie loses a lot of its suspense.It falls back into the cliché of the genre, and the real killer becomes extremely obvious towards the end of the movie. Still, Mindhunters manages to be entertaining if you are a fan of Harlin and his ability for big action sequences – not to mention a little bit of gore.The movie does have some problems toward the end, and Harlin seems to lose focus of trying to make a suspenseful movie.

Kilmer takes the rest of the cast on a field trip through “Crimetown”

Instead, the director shifts gears and turns the movie into more of an action survival movie with the last few team members fighting to stay alive.

The cast quickly discovers a real killer is with them

The change of pace and style doesn’t ruin the movie, but does kill any measure of suspense that the film had built up. This change also makes the ending extremely predictable, and too much information is given to justify the killer’s motives.The movie has a few interesting special features including Profiling Mindhunters – a look at the making of the movie and how Harlin put his actors through a boot camp for F.B.I. agents; a look at the stunt sequences of the film – that takes you through the different steps that were taken to do some of the bigger stunts of the movie and the actors involvement in the stunts; and a director’s walk through Crimetown – which was created to resemble a small town in America - even though it was located in Holland.Although the film becomes kind of cliché by the ending, Mindhunters is a surprisingly fun movie. If you enjoy the thriller genre, then it will hold your attention thanks to the different traps the killer sets for the victims, and the “guess who” the killer is aspect of the plot. Harlin does a good job of keeping the tension up throughout most of the movie, but does turn to big explosions that lose some of the plot’s focus at the end.

The plot breaks down into an action film towards the ending

I would recommend the movie to anyone wanting to watch a halfway decent thriller that is going to entertain in a “popcorn” sense, but not make you too afraid to turn off the light at the end of the night. Mindhunters is available for pre-order at Amazon for a Sept. 20th release and available for pre-order at AmazonUK for an Oct. 17th release. Visit the film’s database for more information.

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