Movie Review : Mindgamers (2015)

There are bad movies and there are movies so bad, they're actually endearing. They are becoming increasingly hard to find over the years, since Hollywood executives have become terrified of taking risks with their money. But they still exist, guys. They do. I've accidentally found one the other day called Mindgamers and I'm excited to tell you about it. It's like Equilibrium's handicapped little brother. The one who's overweight and dyes his bangs green. It's a fucking riot, I'm telling you.

So, I'm not sure what Mindgamers was about. I can tell you there's no video game character play using their mind in it, but the rest is a little...uh, muddled? I'll do my best to explain. The film is set ten years in the future or so, where humanity has developed a technology that allows people to take over someone else's mind. Let's say, someone who quadriplegic could use the mind of a person who still has control of their limbs in order to walk again. Or at least, that's how I understood it. Mindgamers doesn't go past superficial explanations

And, you know. There are pure-hearted students who want to use this power for good, an evil scientist with nefarious intensions, yadda, yadda. I'm sure you've expected that.

Let's get started on the weirdness and overall incompetence. Mindgamers looks like it was edited by someone having a Red Bull overdose. The scenes are often too short and rush into another that doesn't have anything to do with it. Oh, there's a scientific discussion explaining crucial plot points? Who gives a fuck? Cut it to tree minutes of a character that wasn't introduced yet doing parkour to a dubstep song. Because it was fucking cool three years ago. Woo! Mindgamers is trying to hard to be sexy and smart that it comes off like a desperate Tinder date. I mean, look at these fucking guys.

Every character in this movie looks so fucking goofy. Even dignified Sam Neil, the big name actor in Mindgamers, looks like a parody of evil scientists from Hammer films. He wears a gold mask on the bottom of his face to conceal paralysis on half of his face at some point. I mean, why? It makes you look even weirder than being paralyzed. The director Andrew Goth was so damn preoccupied with identifying Sam Neil's character as the bad guy, he dressed him up like he was cosplaying Masters of the Universe. There's also a goth guy because there need to be one, right? And a black girl thrown in for diversity. Mindgamers has too many characters and none of them ultimately matters.

I had a wicked good time at the expense of Mindgamers' painful shortcoming. A movie that takes itself so freakin' seriously and misses the mark so bad can't be anything but funny. If you don't want to invest eighty-something minutes into it, the official trailer gives pretty much everything away. The dance scene is even included. Because there's a freakin' dance scene in this movie, believe it or not. That's Mindgamers for you. A movie that dares to be different in the worst possible ways.