In 2004, a movie called Mindhunters came out, and it is an astoundingly bad piece of shit that I watched yesterday. It was so bad that it made me angry enough to start a whole new feature here at GAMbIT, so welcome, I guess, to our first installment of flashback reviews.
The thing about Mindhunters is, we let this happen. Watching it is like being a bystander in the Kitty Genovese case. I have to believe that a struggling screenwriter saw this film, went home, and promptly hung himself. More than one, I’m sure. That blood is on your hands, Mindhunters. You know how every time a Katy Perry song plays, a Beatles song fades from existence, like the photograph of the McFly kids in Back to the Future? (Seriously, the first time I heard “California Gurls” I looked at my copy of Abbey Road and saw that “Something” was now called ” om th g.”) This film has the same effect. Mindhunters sucks so hard that now I can’t remember Boogie Nights. So click play on this trailer, then strap yourself the fuck in, cause we need to talk about this.
Mindhunters was directed by Renny Harlin, who’s like William Friedkin for dumbasses. If Renny Harlin made Sorcerer, it would be called Bomb Truck, and it would be 100 minutes of heart-stopping PG-13 action as Alex Pettyfer drove a tricked-out Scion filled with C4 to the crooked mayor’s house, all while trying to reconcile with his ex-wife and make it to his daughter’s piano recital. With music by Trevor Rabin. Renny Harlin’s most famous movie is Deep Blue Sea, which is firmly in the “so bad it’s good” category.
Anyway, the film opens on JD (Christian Slater) and Sara (Kathryn Morris) investigating a multiple homicide. They’re both killed in action, and as the camera lingers on their dead bodies…we find out it was all a training exercise! All the corpses were played by FBI agents, because mannequins are apparently too expensive and this is the best use of taxpayer money! Mindhunters thinks this is a twist, but really, it’s assuming you’re as stupid as it is. Mindhunters wants us to believe – no, expects us to believe – that two main characters are going to die in the first five minutes.
JD and Sara are part of an elite FBI profiling unit. Well, all the promotional material says they’re elite, but they’re all still trainees. Even though they’re all way too old for this, and one of them already had a career as a cop. But he’s described as an “ex-cop,” so evidently he didn’t take the normal route of applying to the FBI or being recruited. Since when was FBI profiler a back-up plan? Maybe if this blogger thing doesn’t work out I can be chief of police.
The rest of the unit includes wheelchair-bound Vince (Clifton Collins Jr.), fiery Latina Nicole (Patricia Velasquez), brainiac Bobby (Eion Bailey), marksman Lucas (Jonny Lee Miller, doing a Texan accent so broad that I’m convinced he’s making fun of Americans), and Englishman Rafe (Will Kemp), who is English. Their instructor is the cotroversial Jake Harris (Val Kilmer), one of the film’s bright spots because Val Kilmer is the best. The film really wants us to buy that people refer to these individuals as “mindhunters.” Remember the pilot episode of Mad Men, where we’re told that “mad man” was a term for advertising executives in the 60s, and the term was coined by those same advertising executives? That’s what this reminded me of. “Yeah, I’m a profiler with the FBI, but everyone calls us mindhunters!” No, no they don’t. And fuck you for going along with the lie, IMDb trivia. I’m a reviewer for a website, but everyone calls us thunder fuckers!
So the thunder fuckers – sorry, mindhunters – get ready for their field trip to the island of Oniega, a Navy training base that Harris uses once a year to train recruits. They’re joined by Gabe (LL Cool J, credited as “James Todd Smith aka LL Cool J,” and no I’m not making that shit up), an outside observer.
I’m convinced that LL Cool J took this role because he thought it was super bad ass; to wit, one character references Gabe’s tattoos, one of which is a gun. Just a gun, like a revolver, on his arm. But at least he’s not wearing that fucking kangol hat, so that’s a plus. Jake tells the team that their task will be to build a profile of the killer known as the Puppeteer. So off the team goes for trust falls and more exposition.
For instance, we find out that Patricia and JD are having an affair. This has less than nothing to do with the plot, and the more I think about, the surer I am that Slater only took the role of JD if he could make out with a smokin’ hot babe, which is definitely how that is worded in his contract.
Soon creepy shit starts to happen (creepier than Christian Slater’s ass). Sara finds a dead cat in the locker room with a watch, frozen at 10:00, stuffed in its mouth. The next day the team finds the Puppeteer’s “victim” – it’s a mannequin – and JD sets off a Rube Goldberg-style trap that results in him being frozen with liquid nitrogen, then shattering as his body hits the ground, like something you’d see on Itchy & Scratchy. You’ve stuck with me for almost 1,000 words about this cinematic hate crime, so let me thank you by showing you this:
I’m sure there’s some joke to be made about Christian Slater’s career freezing then shattering. How was this guy ever a thing? We are all complicit in this man’s inexplicable success. Why did we let him get away with that half-assed Jack Nicholson impression? We already have a Jack Nicholson and we throw Oscars at him! Here’s my theory: Christian Slater did True Romance, where he played the quintessential “cool guy,” and now he thinks he is that guy. He’s living in character as Clarence Worley.
As you can imagine, JD’s death happens at 10:00 – just like the watch said! The mindhunters better WATCH themselves, they’re running out of TIME. There’s an actual killer on Oniega, and it could be any of them. Thus begins the shittiest version of Ten Little Indians you’ll ever see. To be fair, I think the watch motif is actually kind of cool; it’s not clever or innovative, but it adds a sense of helplessness and inevitability to the proceedings.
The team decides to GTFO after JD’s death, so they head to the pier and the boat docked there. But the boat explodes! KA-BLOOEY! Sara is cast into the water and promptly freaks out. We find out later that this is because her sister was raped and drowned, and she hasn’t been in the water since. Even for a movie as violent as Mindhunters, that is a super dark back story.
Shitty Mystery, Inc. drinks coffee while they recuperate from the blast, but the coffee is drugged and they all pass out. When they awaken, they find that Rafe is dead, having come down with a terminal case of head-not-being-attached-to-neck. Suspicion is cast on Gabe, who redeems himself by saving Vince from a stupidly elaborate trap involving a broken water line and dangling fluorescent lights. Needless to say, he does so by shooting footholds into a wall and climbing over to the circuit breaker.
I’m kind of offended you thought I might be kidding. But it turns out the trap wasn’t for Vince, it was for Bobby, who tried to fix the water line and got a face full of arrows for his trouble. I’m not even going to bother explaining how this shit worked. Apparently the killer was banking on Bobby’s propensity for fixing things, which is as flimsy and stupid as depending on Rafe’s love of coffee. The fact that it was successful just makes it stupider.
Now it’s time for the montage, as the mindhunters realize that they’re profilers and should maybe do some, you know, profiling. Mindhunters was made during the height of the CSI zeitgeist, back when we thought that forensic scientists were rock stars, and the investigation montage refelcts that attitude. It’s two mind-numbing minutes of logging data into a computer and collecting DNA samples, frenetically edited and scored to generic butt rock. The blood under Rafe’s fingernails shows that Sara is the unsub (“unknown subject”), so now everyone suspects her. Nicole gets stressed out by the subsequent interrogation, leaves the room, and decides to have her first cigarette after quitting. The cigarette is filled with acid – or maybe it’s made of acid? – and it eats away at her from the inside. This movie is stupidly, hilariously gruesome.
Sara figures out that the traps are tailor-made to each team member’s strengths and weaknesses. Apparently they all share the same weakness: predictability. What if Bobby decided that the water line wasn’t a big deal? What if Nicole resisted the temptation to smoke? This movie is on a train track: there’s only one direction and one possible destination.
Jake’s voice starts taunting them from the loudspeakers. Oh, so he’s the killer, right? Well, if you think that, you should be a mindhunter, cause you’re a goddamn moron! Jake is deader than Julius Caesar, strung up like the Puppeteer’s victim. The team discovers his body, then a children’s song starts playing and Jake’s body is jerked up and down like a marionette. This is supposed to be deeply creepy, and if you’re a fucking idiot it probably is. But it’s another case of Mindhunters thinking it’s edgy and scary when it’s really just embarrassing itself.
So if Jake isn’t the killer, then it must be – gulp – one of us! There’s a really bad shootout, wherein Gabe appears to kill Lucas. Meanwhile, Vince (back at HQ) makes his way to the elevator. A shadow approaches, and as Jake sees who it is, he fires his gun, which blows up right in his stupid face. Yet again, a mindhunter has proven to be stupidly predictable, as the killer bet on Vince taking his gun everywhere. Probably cause Vince said “I never go anywhere without my gun” about a thousand fucking times. Seriously, you could make a drinking game out of it. NOTE: do not play this game.
Gabe and Sara confront each other, each convinced that the other is the killer. Which, in movie talk, means that neither is the killer. They fight, then Lucas shows up to help Sara. He’s not dead – yay, I guess? Gabe is subdued and seemingly killed. By now you should have figured out that Lucas is the killer. Apparently he killed his parents and the FBI never suspected him, so he went through years of training and planning to prove a stupid, stupid point, which is that FBI agents routinely don’t suspect children of double homicides. Uh, thanks, we’ll be sure to keep an eye on that, you insane asshole.
There’s a chase, some dumb cat and mouse bullshit, and then Lucas starts to drown Sara. She plays dead and pulls him into the water with her. At this point, three really dumb things happen. Like, Mindhunters dumb. Let’s break it down:
1. There is a fucking shootout, followed by a Mexican standoff, UNDER WATER. I shit you not, at one point Lucas and Sara are just floating there, holding their guns above water.
2. They both hold their breath for a crazy amount of time. Sara in particular has this smug look on her face, like she knows she’s going to outlast Lucas (which she does). Remember, if you will, that Sara hasn’t been in water since her sister was drowned, so how the hell is she so good at holding her breath? Fuck this movie.
3. LL Cool J, who thinks he is very cool, delivers not one, not two, but three tough guy one-liners. There are, in order: “Time’s up, asshole.” “Good thing you hit like a girl.” “I guess we found what his weakness was: bullets.” I might join those struggling screenwriters I made up and hang myself.
I’ve embedded the scene below for your viewing, um…not “pleasure”…just skip to the 4:00 mark and watch it. It sucks.
So the film mercifully ends, and everyone in the theater realizes that it would have been a better use of $10 if they just fucking ate it. I honestly considered cancelling my Netflix account after watching this.
I thought about giving this one star, but there is no light to be found here. Mindhunters is void, it is blackness, it is the howling oblivion at the edge of existence. Before Man was, Mindhunters was here, waiting. This film is our punishment, for a crime too great for us to ever know. It is frustratingly unknowable, yet obscenely familiar.
Mindhunters is available on Netflix Instant, or you can find the whole thing on YouTube (helpfully embedded here).
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