Mindhunters movie review & film summary (2005)

In "Mindhunters," a thriller directed by Renny Harlin, the suspects and/or victims are assembled on an isolated island that has been rigged up by the FBI as a training facility. It looks like a real town, but is equipped with video cameras and hidden technology so supervisors can see how well trainees handle real-life problems, not that getting your head shattered into super-cooled fragments is a challenge they'll be facing every day on the job.

The formula was used early and well by Agatha Christie, whose influence on "Mindhunters" has been cited by such authorities as the Hollywood Reporter and Film Threat. In the London play "The Mousetrap," which is now in the third century of its run, she assembled a group of characters in a snowbound country house; one of them has died, and the others try to solve the murder during long conversations in the sitting room involving much malt whiskey, considerable tobacco, unwise "looks around the house," and the revelation that some of the people are not really strangers to one another. It was possibly this play that gave us the phrase, "Where were you when the lights went out?"

To the Agatha Christie formula, "Mindhunters" adds another literary inspiration: George Orwell's "The Decline of the English Murder," a brilliant essay in which he celebrated the golden age of British poisoning and other ingenious methods of disposal. The victims were usually married to their killer, who tended to be a meek accountant who had fallen into a trap set by a floozy: "In the last analysis," Orwell writes, "he [commits] murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery."

But by 1946, when Orwell was writing, British standards had fallen off fearfully, and in the famous "Case of the Cleft Chin Murder," "The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film." So there we go again, vulgar Americans with our wicked influence on the Brits, who in murder as elsewhere maintained elegant traditions until we spoiled the game by just having people kill each other.

Orwell might have been cheered by "Mindhunters," although Christie would have wanted a more ingenious solution. They both might have thought that the killer in the movie goes to a dubious deal of difficulty to create elaborate murder situations that depend on perfect timing, skillful mechanics, a deep knowledge of the characters, and a single-minded focus on providing the movie with Gotcha! scenes. Does the killer in any one of these movies ever have a moment of weariness and depression? ("What the hell, instead of rigging the liquid nitrogen and re-wiring the town, I think I'll just shoot somebody.")