{Todd}’s review published on Letterboxd:
"All this time the killer's been profiling us!"
This is basically the best episode of Criminal Minds ever! Twenty minutes in I am already loving this film, and then LL Cool J shows up!!!! This is like if they took an escape room and then turned it into a high budget film. I think it is fair to call this movie genre-defining, but the genre is post "2000 Cheesy TV Crime Drama." In fact, 4 different people from this film went on to star in TV crime profiling shows, that's research I did.
This movie covers a team of FBI profiling students on a mission that goes crazy. In classic profiler tradition, every person in this film is playing 99-dimensional chess. It is great.
One of the best criminal profiling mystification films ever. It also came out one full year before the TV show Criminal Minds. Also, this came out the same year as Saw and I would say this film is kind of a soft-R type of Saw film.
This is the perfect type of script for Renny Harlin because his specialty is doing incredibly stupid scripts on reasonable budgets that are slightly better than you would expect (except for Cutthroat Island, fuck Cutthroat Island). This film has every possible serial killer cliche in it but somehow Renny Harlin's commitment and weird effects kept me watching. The kill scenes are creepy, magnificent trash.