"Mindhunters" is the kind of psycho-killer thriller in which the ever-shrinking cast of characters dies one by one because they're too stupid to stick together and stay somewhere safe. Fear and naiveté can account for such stupidity when the slaughter fodder is the usual nubile teenagers, but there's just no excuse for it in a movie about FBI agents training to be criminal profilers.

Trapped alone on a military staging-ground island where they're supposed to be undergoing a field test, after one or two gruesome murders they realize there's a bloodthirsty nutjob among them. But do they, say, load up on food and go outside to sit on a hill where they can keep an eye on each other until their supervisor (Val Kilmer) returns in a couple days? Nope. They just keep wandering around the dark bowels of abandoned buildings, usually alone, while the killer sets preposterously elaborate death traps.

After a prosaic round of stock-character-establishing episodes, action-horror hack director Renny Harlin ("The Exorcist: The Beginning") spends half the movie on feeble attempts by the C-list cast (Christian Slater, LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris, Patricia Velasquez, etc.) to weed out the psycho, and the other half on these supposedly intellectual investigators jumping to asinine conclusions and turning against each other until someone screams, "This is what the killer wants!"

These clowns couldn't get jobs as dogcatchers, let alone FBI agents.

Logically porous to an insulting and obvious degree (the killer, who declares in advance the time of each murder, is briefly outwitted by one clock being set back 15 minutes), "Mindhunters" is such a deluge of drivel that I could fill another four or five paragraphs just cataloging its commonsense blunders before I even got around to deriding the banal filmmaking that Harlin tries to cover up with hyperactive editing and HandyCam overkill.

But since the movie isn't the kind of awful that is unintentionally amusing, making such ridicule fun to read, I'll just sum up by saying one big "Oh, please!" and stop wasting your time.