Val Kilmer Movie:

Editorial Review:
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

Mindhunters Reviews:
2.5 stars out of 4
2008-12-28 - The Bottom Line:

Mindhunters is enjoyable enough and quick-moving but exceptionally contrived; the fun of this type of movie should be to guess the killer, but when the answer is arbitrary anyway (something like 3 endings were shot) the movie loses its reason for being.

Highly entertaining
2008-11-24 - LL Cool J shows his acting chops, but this is a director's movie all the way. Very stylized and dark. Great special effects, slow motion, weird camera angles. It's a cat and mouse game, hide and seek. You'll wonder who the real killer is all the way to the end, and you'll still have your doubts. It's gory, but not stomach churning, somehow. I'd never heard of this and it makes a worthwhile rental for a night.

Mind Hunters
2007-11-06 - 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
2007-10-13 - 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
2007-10-10 - 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.