Mindhunters is an efficient thriller about a team of young people training to be FBI profilers. But this is not a cop or FBI movie as such. Instead, its form is of the old horror-movie staple in which a group of people trapped in some remote place find themselves being picked off one by one, if not by a mysterious monster then by a psychopath. This structure also calls to mind the kind of murder mystery Agatha Christie produced in Ten Little Indians.
Here, the victims are not quite the set of pulchritudinous young things to which we have become accustomed. It may be pleasant to watch the likes of a busty, sweaty Paris Hilton (in House of Wax) getting done in, but often such actors are barely capable of letting out a convincing scream. So it’s good that the cast of Mindhunters is a little more mature, though youthful enough to be credible FBI students, and still reasonably good to look at. Val Kilmer, in yet another excessively self-conscious performance, plays their teacher, who, as part of their final test, drops them off on an isolated (of course) island training base. They are left there to find the traces of a crime and a killer, to solve the former and hunt down the latter. Except that barely have they found evidence of such than they themselves start becoming the victims of an all-too-real murderer.
The cast is a fair cross-section of folks; there has to be some sort of characterological diversity, or one might begin to lose track — one of them is even, unaccountably, British. Christian Slater is the team leader, wry yet forceful. (He also gets an entirely gratuitous shower scene with naked butt — could that possibly be a body double, or has he been in the gym? I can almost hear his personal trainer: ”Come on, Chris! Work that gluteus to the max!”) Jonny Lee Miller is one of the bright young stars of the team. Kathryn Morris is an insecure young woman who may not be in this job for the right reasons and Clifton Collins Jr is wheelchair-bound and overly fond of his gun. LL Cool J plays an outsider, a working cop along to observe. The rest are barely given enough screen time to matter, but they all take their allotted places in the plot.
If you walk out of Mindhunters wondering whether it is even vaguely plausible, such doubts do not detract from the thrills and frights. And that, after all, is what this kind of movie is for.