Mindhunters was a venture into the serial killer thriller mini-genre. Like most of Renny Harlin’s films, Mindhunters also proved to be a financial flop. Though made on a $27 million budget, it earned a pitiful $1.9 million on its opening weekend and a total of $4.5 million in domestic US box-office gross – in many countries, it went directly to dvd release without any cinematic screening. Mindhunters was one of several other films in the serial killer genre that came out that same year, along with Taking Lives (2004) and Twisted (2004) – although only the first of these was modestly successful (largely because it starred Angelina Jolie). The fad for serial killer/forensic profiling thrillers had peaked over a decade ago after the massive success of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and fourteen years later it was feeling like a genre that had been creatively milked out in terms of originality. (The best works among these revivals of the serial killer genre were those that came from European countries such as Antibodies (2005) from Germany and the tv movies Cold Blood (2005-6) from the UK).

In a very short space of time, Renny Harlin’s absurdly over-the-top set-pieces plunge Mindhunters down into bad movie stakes. In fact, you are groaning in disbelief from the very first scene where Harlin sets up an atmospherically detailed sequence where the agents enter a house where a serial killer has a woman prisoner and everything goes awry, before the entire scenario is preposterously revealed to be a training simulation. Once the film gets to the island, each of the killing set-pieces that Renny Harlin throws up are so over-the-top as to be laughable. Christian Slater has a ridiculous demise where he is blasted by liquid nitrogen and falls to the floor, shattering into shards like broken glass. One victim is touched whereupon their head falls off – the toucher somehow not managing to notice that the person had a severed neck – before the group finds that while they were out cold, the killer has drained the victim’s blood to paint the walls with symbols. Another victim lights a cigarette, which causes them to melt down because it is tinged with acid. There is a completely absurd scene full of ridiculously hyped false suspense where a broken light fitting turns a flooded floor into an area that is lethally charged with electricity and the wheelchair-ridden Clifton Collins Jr is left having to hang from pipes on the ceiling while LL Cool J has to kick and shoot holes in the wall to climb along and turn the power off. There is an amazingly silly climactic showdown between Kathryn Morris and the killer with both holding their breath underwater in a swimming pool and trying to shoot the other with a handgun poked up out of the water.

The plot of Mindhunters has been loosely taken from Agatha Christie’s oft-filmed novel/play Ten Little Indian/Ten Little Niggers (1939) – see the film version And Then There Were None (1974) for details. Renny Harlin seems oblivious to the ridiculous twists and turns that the script seems to require – the climax, for instance, has not one but two people returning from the dead after we think these characters have been bumped off. Despite setting itself amid a group of forensic profiling trainees, the script never seems to be in the slightest rooted in any believable motivation or credible psychology. LL Cool J is revealed to be the killer and upon doing so turns psycho and advances on Kathryn Morris before he is downed and then later revealed not to be the real killer. While one has no particular problem with this revelation, it leaves a major plausibility hole of if LL Cool J is not the killer then why is he acting like one and menacing Kathryn Morris. Mindhunters is a ridiculous film and one where Renny Harlin’s absurd and over-the-top direction massacres an already preposterous script.