Mindhunters

An impotent mix of Se7en and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, this thriller has a pervasive atmosphere of déjà vu, with many sequences lifted seemingly whole from other movies. The plot concerns a group of FBI trainees, sent to a remote island on an elaborate training exercise by their predictably unorthodox mentor, Val Kilmer. They are joined at the last minute by police officer LL Cool J and Christian Slater (surely too old to be a new FBI recruit), who round out the B-movie cast list. When one of their number is murdered, the group begins to suspect that there may be a time-obsessed serial killer on the loose. There are the usual guilty pleasures to be had from seeing how the victims are dispatched, and in this respect Mindhunters works better as a teenage slasher than as the dark thriller it wants to be. However, the characters are so bland and indistinguishable, and Renny Harlin's direction so full of circling Steadicam shots and meaningless slow-motion gloss, that it becomes increasingly difficult to care.