Excellent take on 10 Little Indians!

Written by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin
Directed by Renny Harlin

Val Kilmer Harris
Christian Slater J.D. Reston
Kathryn Morris Sarah Moore
Jonny Lee Miller Lucas Halpern
LL Cool J Gabe
Patricia Velazquez Nicole Willis
Eion Bailey Bobby Whitman
Will Kemp Rafe Perry
Clifton Collins Jr Vince Sherman (The wheelchair-bound one.)

I don’t know why everyone seems to hate director Renny Harlin so much. After Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2, everyone just seemed to turn on him. I thought Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight were very good action movies, yet everyone savaged them. I can’t defend Deep Blue Sea or Driven because I didn’t see them, but in my opinion, he’s a good director whose action movies always entertain me, and this one is one of his best.

A group of FBI trainees hoping to make the profiler division under their trainer, Harris (Val Kilmer) are sent to for the weekend to an island normally used by the Navy, where Harris has setup a simulation of a murder that suddenly turns real as the trainees themselves are offed one by one, and in the style of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, are forced to use their profiling to skills to try and figure out which one of them is the killer.

The killing of the first person was totally shocking to me because I wasn’t expecting it, and even as it happened, I was certain it was some type of trick or dream or something. But it wasn’t. The movie constantly keeps you off-balance by not doing what you expect, by not being afraid to kill the characters you really like and think aren’t going to die, and by twisting old movie chiches like the gun standoff. It’s a constant game of misdirection and second-guessing as the character you think is the killer turns out to be the next victim, or just another red herring. The movie is also very intelligent in the details that it focuses on, particularly the clues that the trainees analyze in their investigation, and the personality quirks that they are trained to analyze in those around them, as in one expository scene in a bar where the classmates try to predict and guess things about the other bar patrons.

Another great touch is how the killer takes each victim according to that person’s personality traits. For example, if one trainee likes the beach, the killer will take him out by having him fall into a pit that fills up with sand, or if another is a pyromaniac, he’ll end up burned alive. (Neither of these two examples are in the movie; I just made them up to illustrate the point, and to avoid spoilers.) When the killer ultimately is revealed, it’s because the trainees were smart enough to beat him at the killer’s own game.

There are some of the usual implausibilities inherent to the genre, like why the Navy would leave NO ONE on this island for this one weekend, how in the hell the killer had the time to set up all these traps (some of which are said to have been set up not beforehand, but in between the killings), and the utter absurdity of the results of the crime evidence analysis being available in an hour or so. I also feel that the very last red herring was one two many, as the plot could’ve been satisfied with the track on which the story was going right before it was thrown at us.

Bottom line: SEE THIS MOVIE when it comes out January 9th, 2004!

For more info on it, go to upcomingmovies.com, or the Internet Movie Database.

Oooh, Eion Bailey is in this eh? He's a great actor. Have you seen A Better Place yet Luigi?

No, but I've seen Fight Club.

P.S.: Driven and Deep Blue Seas SUCKED!

Well, the movie is FINALLY out today. Wonder what took it so long.

Yeah, I remember seeing a trailer for it quite a while ago. I'd wondered where it went.

Although you make some good points Luigi, as always, I thought this movie was awful. It had the budget of an 80s B movie with a decent cast. This movie also had cliches related to horror flicks, such as the woman going off by herself near the end when they were supposed to pair up.

I am a fan of most things in the profiling genre, but how it is depicted in this movie was fueled by pop culture and completely inaccurate. The style of murders were sick but quite ingenious, and I too thought the first was shocking. However, the killer was the only one who didn't drink the coffee so I wasn't too surprised most of the movie.

That's at least two movies by this director where the black man lives, and it's the same actor.

SPOILERS AHEAD:




There are some of the usual implausibilities inherent to the genre, like why the Navy would leave NO ONE on this island for this one weekend, how in the hell the killer had the time to set up all these traps (some of which are said to have been set up not beforehand, but in between the killings), and the utter absurdity of the results of the crime evidence analysis being available in an hour or so. I also feel that the very last red herring was one two many, as the plot could’ve been satisfied with the track on which the story was going right before it was thrown at us.

I saw it twice but always missed the first 30 minutes. Still, it's a very tight horror movie, and the suspense makes itnot advisable for late night. Also, several scenes were too gory for me...

But those two points you mentioned bugged me most. One was the time to set the traps. The killer has one night to do at least the following traps:
- catch and kill a feral cat (can't have been easy to catch a wild cat)
- find and kill the federal agents and Harris (1 hr. at least)
- rig the bomb on the boat pier
- set the trap with the dominoes and the gas bottle in the shop (1 hr. at least)

all this during the night, without any of his bunk mates waking up from the cat noises and noticing him missing.

Then, the next day, they all stick together, so the only time the killer has is when they are all asleep from the coffe - I think 4 hrs. at most - to do at least the following:
- kill the coffeedrinker, drain her blood and write all those numbers on the glass wall (1 hr. at least)
- set the traps with the water pipe, ceiling lights and crossbow in the basement (according to tech guy, that would have taken some time)
- set the poisioned cigarette pack
- take some blood from the frozen victim and place it under the girlfriends' fingernails as incriminating evidence
- prepare the magazine of the wheelchair guy, but hide it in the pistol of the dead body in the freezer room

I'll assume that, despite the emphasis on ticking clocks and time passing, a lot of the traps weren't operated by clockwork, but rather by radio control, since despite the killer boasting how predictable his fellows were, even he could hardly predict where people would be at a given time.
Also, if he knew the island was deserted, he might have prepared the bombs etc. beforehand and brought them in his duffel bag (it's not as if they were going to be searched, right?)

The second problem I had was the black guy talking and acting during the guys fistfight as if he was the killer, for seemingly no other purpose than to put the viewers on the wrong track. If he was hoping to get a confession or "But I'm the big bad-ass killer here!" from the real killer, an all-out fist-fight isn't quite a good opporunity for that tactic, I think.

Lastly, when the killer and the last girl are fighting, the killer taunts her that if the chopper next morning finds his body with her bullet in his brain (and given the planted evidence), with nobody else alive to back up her story, nobody will believe her to be innocent and defending herself, they will think she's the killer of everybody. However, what plan and story did the real killer have for the chopper and agents arriving next morning? If everybody else was dead, how would he have convinced them of his innocence? Did he believe that because the cops didn't consider a 10-year-old capable of murdering his own parents, they will think him innocent again and be taken in again by his act?

A minor nit is the fact that the black cop, after being hit with a heavy metal fire extinguisher, comes back from the apparent dead with no problems at all - no concussion, partial amnesia, double vision, headaches, any problems he shrugs off that the woman "hits like a girl". Sorry, don't buy it. That metal can has mass even if swung with half force, and additionally, he falls down some stairs.