Mindhunters is a 2004 crime slasher film directed by Renny Harlin and starring Kathryn Morris, LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Patricia Velásquez, Clifton Collins Jr., Christian Slater, and Val Kilmer. It was written by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin with an uncredited rewrite by Ehren Kruger. Unusually, the last country to receive this film was the United States in 2005, because of the film's distribution rights being changed from 20th Century Fox to Dimension Films. Plot The Mindhunters are a group of FBI trainee agents who are training as profilers. Their instructor, experienced profiler Jake Harris, employs a highly realistic training approach by assigning the group variants of real investigations, including elaborate sets, props, and FBI actors, to play out each scenario. The student group is made up of Bobby, Vince, Nicole, Sara, Rafe, and Lucas. Alongside Harris is J.D., an experienced agent who leads the group and is secretly Nicole's lover too. Nearing the end of their training, the group's overall morale is high. However, Vince discovers that neither he nor Sara will make the rank of "profiler" after secretly reading their training evaluations. The group travels with Harris and J.D. to a small island off the coast of North Carolina to complete their final training exercise. At the last minute, they are joined by Gabe, an outside observer who has requested to see Harris's teaching methods in action. The Navy uses the island to train for hostage rescue and outbreak scenarios, and it features an existing "population" of target dummies, vehicles on mechanical rails, and small-town storefronts. Similar to their earlier training scenarios, Harris plans on using the town for their final exam, tracking a serial killer calling himself, "The Puppeteer". The team settles down for the evening and practices their profiling skills, whereupon it is revealed that Gabe is also a skilled profiler in his own right. Sara and Lucas briefly bond over losses in their families. Sara's sister was murdered and drowned years previously, creating a persistent fear of water in Sara, while Lucas' parents died when he was 10. The two resolve to use the scenario to confront their personal fears. The following morning, the group finds a dead cat with a broken pocket watch in its mouth. Later, during the initial investigation of the "puppeteer" scenario, J.D. dies after triggering a clock mechanism that causes a tank of liquid nitrogen (mislabeled as helium)