It’s not often I’d be talking about Agatha Christie, Renny Harlin, Val Kimer and LL Cool J in the same breath, but thanks to the world of Tinseltown magic, here we are! And, before you’re mis-led into thinking this video is about the great Netflix show of the same name, let me just set the record straight. This ain’t that one folks. Nope, the movie we’re focusing on today somehow manages to blend the classic British literary world of Agatha Christie with LL Cool J spitting out lines like. That’s right gore-hounds, twenty years ago director Renny Harlin was best known for action classics, pirate movies, dangling Sylvester Stallone from great heights and giant sharks; way before the likes of The Meg and more recently, Under Paris. Then, an intriguing project came his way that would blend the worlds of Agatha Christie and gangster rappers, in a movie that wasn’t met with a particularly warm welcome upon release – Mindhunters (watch it HERE).
The entire ‘one of us is a killer and we must find out who before we’re all murdered’ subgenre has, of course, been done to death, if you pardon the pun! Mindunters takes the premise to a secluded island that’s been rigged up by the FBI to look like a training camp, where the suspects / killers are assembled and must work out who the psycho amongst them is. Which is basically a reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mystery novel And Then There Were None where a graduating class of would-be F.B.I. agents are sent to the fictional Oniega Island, an isolated training compound, where they will spend the weekend profiling an imaginary killer known as The Puppeteer.
Harlin had already proven he could handle action with Die Hard 2, Cutthroat Island, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea; all of which are movies with more than a handful of redeeming features, plus some very memorable sequences. However, could he turn those skills into a movie where Val Kilmer’s awesome mullet was in danger of stealing the show? Let’s find out here, on what happened to Mindhunters.
Over the years the crime thriller and horror genres have collided wonderfully, with films such as The Silence of the Lambs, Seven and more recently Longlegs, proving that the mixture of a police procedural whodunnit with some lovely gore, is a winner with audiences. Sure, you may get the occasional dud like the Johnny Depp, Heather Graham 2001 thriller From Hell, but overall it’s a genre with legs. Long ones in fact. However, could Mindhunters continue the trend of mixing the crime, thriller and now slasher genre not only being high in quality, but also memorable for all the right reasons? Well, gore-hounds, we’ll take a deep dive into its merits shortly, but first let’s take a look at how it came to be in the first place, and who the talent is both behind and in front of the camera.
South African filmmaker Wayne Kramer, probably best known for directing the 2003 crime drama The Cooler and the 2006 action thriller Running Scared, sold the spec screenplay for Mindhunters to 20th Century Fox, under his original idea for the project’s title – Unsub. Which sounds like something you should definitely not be doing to our channel and is also a pretty bad title for a crime / slasher flick. Fox seemed to agree and insisted the movie be called Mindhunters instead, despite Kramer having reservations because it clashed with the title of John Douglas’ crime book, titled Mindhunter. The novel was the main inspiration behind the Netflix show of the same name from 2017, which sadly didn’t make it past two seasons.
As I mentioned earlier, behind the camera was Finnish filmmaker Renny Harlin, but it almost wasn’t to be. Harlin was originally attached to direct the film adaptation of A Sound of Thunder, based on the short story by Ray Bradbury, however once he learned that Val Kilmer had cultivated the most awesome mullet as tribute to the great man, he couldn’t turn Mindhunters down. Which may not be 100% true gore-hounds, but I like to think it is! So with the main man onboard to sit on the director’s chair, just how did the casting of main characters Jake Harris, Gabe Jensen, Lucas Harper and Sara Moore come about? Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen and Gary Busey were all offered the part of Jake Harris, but they rejected the film before Val Kilmer and his mullet agreed to do the movie. The role of Jake Harris almost went to another horror alumni, Ryan Phillipe but was ultimately offered to Trainspotting star Jonny Lee Miller. Gerard Butler was originally set to play Lucas Harper but he dropped out to star in Timeline, while Kathryn Morris was cast to play Sara Moore. Clifton Collins Jr. is in there as Vince Sherman, plus there’s Patricia Velásquez as Nicole Willis, Eion Bailey as Bobby Whitman, Will Kemp as Rafe Perry, and Christian Slater as J.D. Reston.
Shooting on the movie mainly took place in the Netherlands, including its superb capital city, Amsterdam, in its northern borough, Amsterdam-noord, plus The Hague and Delft. The production also shot in the beach town of Zandvoort, on the Veluwe heath lands in the Gelderland province, plus the training village of the Police Academy in Ossendrecht. In order to cut costs down the bulk of the movie’s post-production was moved to the UK in London, where a lot of Hollywood productions go to use the excellent post facilities in and around Soho. Director Harlin apparently toned down the violence during post-production in order for the film to secure a PG-13 rating in the US. However, the MPAA still felt that the movie was too dark, and issued it an R which prompted Harlin to re-insert the scenes he’d initially removed.
Renny Harlin is a very good movie director and I’ve enjoyed many of his films over the years, especially the often underrated Die Hard 2 and its airport based shenanigans. I also really dug the Sylvester Stallone thriller Cliffhanger, and not just because Ace Ventura 2 has an awesome piss-take of the famous wire scene. That poor damn raccoon man! For some reason, however, I never saw the attraction of paying my hard earned buck to see LL Cool J and the be-mulleted Val Kilmer team up as part of an Agatha Christie inspired who-dunnit. So, the opportunity to catch the movie for the first time here at JoBlo, and provide some perspective on it was great. Actually watching the movie though. That part wasn’t so great.
The plot, as mentioned briefly earlier, follows a group of FBI trainees who are taken to a remote island for simulation training. However, once there, they realize that they’re being hunted by a serial killer, who might be someone amidst them. So far, so good. The premise is fine and although it’s not at all original, it could have been a fun ride. However, writers Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin don’t manage to inject the characters with any real personality and the script is often laughably tedious. Once the FBI students are sent to the remote island by Val Kilmer’s maverick instructor, they undertake an exercise in which they must provide a profile of the apparently fictitious serial killer known as The Puppeteer. Naturally, all is not what it seems, and before long the exercise becomes a battle for survival.
This would usually be all well and good if the resulting carnage was heavy on the claret; unfortunately though, what we get are people being frozen by jets of helium, death by acid cigarette, being impaled by spears and not much more to be honest. Some of the kills are admittedly quite inventive and match what seems like the one and only character trait each victim has been afforded by the writers. There’s one character who won’t go anywhere without a gun, one who likes to smoke, and they invariably die due to the weakness in their particular trait. The killers’ habit of keeping to a strict deadline for their murdering spree does bring some decent tension but the eventual reveal isn’t satisfying enough to have kept them hidden in the movie for so long. Overall, Mindhunters is exactly what you’d expect from how it was sold during its marketing campaign; It looks like a direct to video title and despite some fun sequences, it’s probably best left to those looking for a cheap laugh and some tame kills on a Monday night.
Mindhunters was released domestically on May 13th, 2005, but only made a disappointing $4.5 million from a reported budget of $27 million. The movie’s release strategy was perhaps not the smartest, with it opening on the same day as the third Star Wars prequel, Revenge of the Sith, plus other movies with a similar audience demographic. Kingdom of Heaven was in its second week, the Jet Li action flick Unleashed was doing quite well, plus another rapper’s movie had already grossed way more than Mindhunters; Ice Cube’s XXX: State of the Nation.
Critically, the movie received generally negative reviews, and it currently holds a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the consensus calls it, “a retread of Ten Little Indians that lacks the source material’s wit”. Roger Ebert awarded the movie 2 ½ stars and had the following to say about how other movies can be likened to it, “I will leave you with only one clue. In ‘House of Wax‘, which opened last week, the movie theater is playing ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’. In this movie, the theater marquee advertises ‘The Third Man’. No, the male characters are not numbered in order, so you can’t figure it out that way, nor is the killer necessarily a woman. So think real hard. What else do you know about ‘The Third Man’? If you have never seen ‘The Third Man’, I urge you to rent it immediately, as a preparation (or substitute) for ‘Mindhunters’”.
So then gore-hounds, I didn’t love the movie, nor was it a complete disaster, but with a very capable director on board, plus a cast that had some excellent pedigree involved in it, it was a let down overall. The whole ‘one of us is a killer and we must find out who before we’re all murdered’ trope has been done to death, so to speak, and has been done better elsewhere. However, the most important opinion we always love to hear is from YOU guys, so what’s your take on Mindhunters? Did you buy into the fun premise and semi-inventive death scenes? Or was this one just a cheesy mullet away from absurdity? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you wonderful gore-hounds next time. Thanks for watching!