Mindhunters (2004)

Mindhunters (2004)

What do you get when you blend a horror/thriller movie with a CSI type concept?  You get a flaming turd directed by Renny Harlin and it stinks up the place.  MH is an unintended comedy.  It tries it hardest to be a stunning thinking man’s thriller, and it is partly a movie version of all those CSI shows from the mid-2000s.  None of it works.  It just represents Harlin’s career. 

Mindhunters is about a group of profiling students trying to get into the FBI.  They go into deep training.  Within this deep training, they find out they’re being hunted one by one using their weaknesses.  They start to turn of each other because they believe the killer is among them.  

Mindhunters is that ugly kid that keeps trying to get the phone numbers from the prefect ten girls.  He just doesn’t get that he’s way out of his league.  Mindhunters tries so hard to be a clever movie, but fails every single time even harder than other movies of its genre.  This partly has to do with Renny Harlin.  He’s not up to the task either because he doesn’t care or have the skill.  I swear Renny Harlin might be one of the worst directors working today.  Bay at least knows how to direct action scenes and he knows how to make things look cool.  Harlin tries hard to make things look cool, but the shots come across as comedic skits.  Harlin forget he was making a movie in the 2000s instead of the 90s.

One point, the team discovers Val Kilmer’s body hanging on some strings like a puppet.  Then, the strings start to move around making Val’s lifeless body move in a jerky fashion.  The team is horrified by the sight, but Harlin directs it in such a way that it seems like a comedic scene.  I actually laughed out with glee when I say Val’s body dancing around. 

Oh, there is another scene where a person seems to be just sitting there, and then their head flops off.  That was supposed to be shocking, but it was just plain funny.  So, this person was just sitting there dead the whole time. 

Another murder happens where a woman literally begins to melt before our eyes.  I laughed over and over.  That actually happened. 

Then, there are these strange zooms on things that make us want to think of better movies with this style.  This is clearly Harlin trying to be Ridley Scott.  Again, he fails. 

And, there is the appearance of Christian Slater and I say appearance because he’s not in this movie that much thankfully.  We also get LL Cool J playing a similar character to the one he played in Deep Blue Sea.  Here, his character should be called Red Herring.  Because, he’s in the movie only to be known as a red herring, IE someone the characters are not supposed to trust.  Yet, the script is so stupid that it just comes across very generic. People don’t trust him and then they do, and we repeat it over and over again.  I will give LL credit for actually trying to take this movie seriously.  He gives it all he has and more, but many of the rest of the cast members know that they are in a Harlin film. 

The movie climaxes with the villain and good guy shooting their CGI bullets underwater and we get a lethal game of Marco-Polo.  I am not making this up.  

The movie carries all the horror tropes we’ve come to hate in the 2000s, while also bring the boring science and blandness of those CSI shows and its clones.  It tries so hard to be a smart thriller/horror movie, but belly flops every time.  Renny Harlin is a hack director that somehow convinces studios to keep funding his movies.  This movie is just another one of those movies that proves his lack of skill. 

Truth be told, MH is probably the funniest movie I’ve seen this year.

Even though I am giving this movie a low score, I highly recommend you see it because it is so bad that it funny. 

Grade: F+