Renny Harlin gets no respect. The director of Mindhunters is a notorious hack, responsible for such stinkers as last year's Exorcist prequel, The Beginning, and the Sylvester Stallone car-racing movie, Driven. But amidst all this detritus, Harlin occasionally emerges as a sort of trash auteur, in such films as the Stallone mountain-climbing thriller, Cliffhanger, and the deliriously silly, Deep Blue Sea. Not that those are particularly good movies, but Harlin infuses them with an infectious sense of fun and a sort of gleeful subversion of genre conventions, as in Deep Blue Sea's brilliant mid-Important Speech shark attack.
Go into Mindhunters with the right expectations, then, and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised. This is a trashy thriller, no doubt, but that's exactly where Harlin has home-court advantage, and he takes the And Then There Were None-style plot and makes a fast-paced, suspenseful and often unpredictable movie.
On a remote island off the North Carolina coast, a group of FBI profilers-in-waiting are set for what they believe is a training exercise: In a mock-up of a small town, they'll find a fake crime scene and have to piece together clues to track an imaginary killer. But soon one of them gets killed for real, and it's clear that someone in their group is picking them off, one by one.
Harlin takes this simple premise and thankfully doesn't muck with it, letting the often awesomely gruesome murders come fast and furious, and keeping the audience on its toes as to who will die next and who the killer might be. He does such a good job of it, actually, that the eventual revelation is a bit anticlimatic, and all the excessive twists and illogical red herrings make the energy peter out toward the end.
Aside from a few recognizable stars (Christian Slater, LL Cool J), the agents are almost all interchangeable, so it takes a while to distinguish one from the other. By the time the killer has offed half the characters, though, the remaining ones are pretty distinctive. LL brings the same kind of agreeable swagger he brought to Harlin's Deep Blue Sea; the two should team up more often. And Val Kilmer, in a relatively small role as the team's trainer, knows exactly how much camp his role requires.
Mindhunters isn't going to reinvent the serial-killer movie, but it's far more entertaining than most recent entries in its genre, and should be seen with an open mind. Renny Harlin deserves that much.