WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Executscan Expected more

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Tessa11 Modern version of an old short story....lots of special ways of killing off each character....in gross/disgusting ways.... Old plot with very few twists...

Devon Elson (absolutetravist) Director Renny Harlin is very much a paracinematic man, and his particular brand of style fits perfectly in the early 2000s aesthetic of excess. High concept thrillers such as Speed rely on an exponentially thrilling pace. Moving the plot along faster than the viewer brain can comprehend the inherent silliness of the core concept.Since Fincher's Se7en, thrillers have taken the macabre turn in the crime genre. Reaching the point of Wan's Saw set within one of those trials of torture. Mindhunters similarly attempts the same zenith, upping Se7en's police duo with a ragtag team of FBI agents, racing to solve an ongoing test of intelligence and insanity. Despite the blatant exposition and character development, none of these people seem smarter than Pitt's hardheaded detective.The agents muster a fun mix of "oh, they've come a long way since" and "oh... who?" Notable entertainers here are Johnny Lee Miller sporting his best Blanche DuBois, Christian Slater and Val Kilmer competing in their natural friendly-yet-suspicious-yet-bored acting styles, and LL Cool J acting as if he was John McClane in yet another preposterous scenario.Attempting to outdo predecessors with 'bigger is better', the story takes place on an isolated island complete with an entire city simulation for a training exercise. According to their teacher, representative of "the mind of a sociopath", presumably not meaning laughably inane and ridiculously convenient for the killer's grand scheme. The film, of course, never slows down to let you question how the entire plot hinges of this arbitrary setting.The script of Mindhunters is definitely where entertainment hinges on as Harlin desperately races ahead of logic and common sense. For such a complex and convoluted mystery build, there are a remarkable number of legitimate plant and pay-offs. Many of them are obvious enough to predict despite the suspension of disbelief being thoroughly tested. Much how Jigsaw relies on sheer chance amidst his philosophical soliloquies, a great number of set-pieces and foreshadowing relies on pure coincidence.The script is constantly testing whether these characters are supposed geniuses outmatched or merely idiots outwitted by another idiot. One particular if insignificant moment of clumsy writing is the repeated mantra of a situation only being secure "on the drive home", the heroes of course proving this right... when boarding a helicopter to safety. Could've easily been fixed for "on the way home" but it doesn't affect the story.In a world of post-modern, meta-narrative ironies, Harlin is successful in his sheer earnestness for pure, dumb, entertainment. For a film about investigative geniuses battling a criminal mastermind, it's best to leave your brain at the door.

LeonLouisRicci Formulaic thrill ride with intellectual pretensions as F.B.I. profilers are at the center. The best and the brightest. Ooops! That is the problem in this visually vigorous "guess the killer among us" Movie. The Agents don't seem to be too smart although they pretend to be, spin and solve a Rubik's Cube in less than two minutes, is an obvious and ostentatious display.If you buy these characters and settle in for the somewhat creative and sanguinary serial killings, the Movie might pass as an entertaining diversion. The set-ups and the executions are the main thing here and complexity or the mysterious are shelved.An acceptable entry into the middle rungs of this kind of thing that has more style than substance. The ending is ho-hum and goes on a bit too long, but in the end it is watchable but frivolous fluff-stuff.

orbitsville-1 I think what I love about the film is that it looks as if the killer himself (herself?) made the movie. The mystery murderer who bumps off FBI Profiler hopefuls during training on a remote island is a precision expert, obsessed with time, meticulous preparation, and love of detail. The film, too, has spectacular visual polish--it's just a great-looking film, everything with this sinister, pristine quality that gives the viewer a fair chance to notice everything and solve the mystery.One by one the trainees start dying, even though it's supposed to be a harmless test of young new recruits who all wanna join the FBI, figure out the sick minds of serial killers, and put them away based only on whatever gory evidence they leave, or don't leave, behind. So unless someone is hiding on the island, the killer is amongst the bunch; the killer is Profiling the Profilers and slaying them one by one. There are clues, fake clues, convoluted messages, arrogant predictions of when the next death will occur (and darned if the impending victims can't manage to get off the clock...another one bites the dust), and no matter how clever the countermeasures, the bodies stack up as suspicion turns to panic turns to failure at keeping the crowd from thinning out.In fact, the deaths are quite gory. Not ultra-super gory, but definitely yuckville. The director has since gone on to express regret at the gore factor shown in his film--yet I can't help feeling that this film needs some gruesome deaths to make a memorable serial killer. This is some sick and twisted individual, and some pretty outrageous murder tactics help make the film an effective horror piece, not just a whodunit. Even if some armchair Sherlocks get within range of the right answer when it comes to the WHO of it all, the sheer demonic fun of getting there--those ghastly but memorable death scenes--makes up for any transparency in the solution. And with this kind of bloody, horrific style, we REALLY want to meet our killer!And anyway, I didn't figure it out. The movie does draw on some trickery that has already been utilized in at least one earlier, classic "one by one they die" murder mystery, and I still missed the big fake-out! The pace is so fast, the shocks so deliciously vile (you would tone this down, dear director? No!!!), that I saw only what the film wanted me to see, at a crucial moment, not what was right there in front of me.The performances go a long way in keeping this admittedly absurd scenario as believable as possible. In particular, I really loved LL Cool J, Kathryn Morris, and Jonny Lee Miller in this. Apparently, the soundtrack was a last-minute affair, relatively speaking, when original attempts didn't sound right in the director's opinion--and the music chosen is just perfect for the film.If you want a gory whodunit, get your nerve up and take a look.