Mindhunters (2004)

Renny Harlin's Mindhunters arrives from 2004 with the weary confidence of a man who has staged this exact ambush before. Seven FBI profilers in training are deposited on a Navy simulation island off North Carolina to hunt a fictional serial killer, and within twenty minutes a real one is freezing them with liquid nitrogen and lacing their cigarettes with acid. The film is Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None with a federal badge and a body count. It is efficient, impersonal, and entirely uninterested in saying anything about the world beyond the frame. That last quality, in this era of cinematic sermonizing, reads almost as a novelty.

The cast is more integrated than the 2004 slasher average, with LL Cool J, Patricia Velasquez, and Clifton Collins Jr. filling out the doomed roster alongside the usual pale faces. The film never remarks on this. Nobody delivers a speech about what it means. The characters are simply present, competent, and then, one by one, deceased. Kathryn Morris's Sara Moore survives to the final reel, out-thinks the killer with a phosphorescent powder trick, and shoots him dead in the water. This is the standard final-girl arithmetic of the genre, inherited from decades of horror, not a thesis about women in law enforcement. She endures because someone has to.

What the film lacks is any appetite for instruction. There is no lesson about capital, no environmental lament, no meditation on identity, no plea on behalf of the misunderstood. The killer is a thrill-seeking narcissist who murdered his parents and wanted worthier prey. The film treats him as a problem to be solved with a bullet. Roger Ebert, reviewing it, offered a hint about The Third Man and let the audience do the work. That is the correct posture for material like this. Mindhunters is a genre exercise, and it knows it, and it asks nothing of us but attention. In the taxonomy of contemporary social consciousness, it registers as a faint pulse and little else.