I’ve become a big Kathryn Morris fan over the years, thanks in large part to her work on the television series Cold Case. I know she has acted in films before (including Minority Report and Paycheck), but I don’t really remember her performances in those. Since I’m very interested in seeing her play someone other than Detective Lily Rush, I decided to check out her IMDB filmography and rent something from the list. I settled on Mindhunters because I didn’t feel like watching those other two films again. Turns out I made a pretty good choice.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Mindhunters is about a group of seven would-be FBI profilers who are taken by their instructor Jake Harris (played by Val Kilmer) to a Navy SEALs training facility on a remote island for their final test. The group is accompanied by Gabe Jensen (LL Cool J), a special liaison from the Philly PD who will oversee the entire exercise. Harris has set up a scenario using fake bodies and so forth to simulate a serial killer on a spree, and the students have to gather clues, evaluate the evidence, and hopefully come up with a decent profile.

The first 30 minutes of the movie is used to introduce us to the characters. With an ensemble cast like this, the quickest way to accomplish this is to establish that each character has a specific trait: the leader, the smoker, the coffee drinker, the outsider, the gun fetishist, etc. There aren’t any unique characters here; they’re all pretty much what you’d expect from a film of this type.

After the audience has had a chance to get to know the characters a bit, the action kicks into gear. The first clue that something is up comes when Sara (Morris) discovers a dead cat in the bathroom. The cat has a watch in its mouth, with the time stopped at 10:00. The agents know right away that this means something will happen at 10.

They go out as a group to start investigating, and they soon come upon the first staged crime scene. While examining the scene, J.D. (Christian Slater) sets off an elaborate trap triggered by dominoes. The end result is that he gets a whole tank of liquid nitrogen blasted at him from point blank range, which freezes his legs, causing them to crumble. The rest of J.D.’s body follows suit, and the agents suddenly realize that this isn’t a “training exercise” any longer.

After J.D.’s body is taken away, the remaining agents find another broken watch specifying another time. When the appointed hour rolls around, another victim is claimed.

The rest of the film then deals with the groups efforts to discover who among them is really the killer — all while getting picked off one by one.

My Reaction: I was expecting Mindhunters to be a pretty cheesy film (sorry, Renny Harlin, but I’m always cautious when you’re at the helm), but it wasn’t that bad. Yes, it’s a blatant ripoff of Agatha Christie’s concept from the novel And Then There Were None and stage play The Mousetrap, and yes, there were some truly ridiculous moments in the film. Nevertheless, I found the overall experience to be entertaining — and that’s really all I’m after.

I was hoping to see Kathryn Morris do something radically different from Lily Rush, and while her character Sara did have some traits that were completely opposite of Rush (being scared and uncertain, for example), I thought the roles were rather similar. Even so, I liked Morris in this and loved the fact that her character was able to stick around for so long.

Some of the plot details were a bit shaky (would the killer really have been able to set up such elaborate death traps while working all alone?), with very few true surprises along the way. Yes, there were numerous misdirections and red herrings; but no real twists to speak of. If the screenwriters had been able to throw a couple in, this movie would have been much better.

I thought the motivation for the killings was pretty weak, and could spend a lot of time poking holes in that as well, if I were so inclined. But I’m not, so I’ll just acknowledge the fact here and move on.

Overall, I thought Mindhunters was an above average thriller. There were some very tense moments along the way, and the plot moved along at a pretty decent clip. I give the film 4 stars out of 5.