"Mind Games" is an excessively talky thriller that is badly flawed but still pretty entertaining. The story involves Tara Mays (played by Jet Jandreau), an Army psychologist who, near her wedding day, gets abducted (by familiar genre actor Robert LaSardo) and is trapped in an RV in a field somewhere. During the film, we follow her attempts to try to escape using her skills.
On the plus side, Jet Jandreau is an appealing and engaging heroine, there are lots of layers to her character and she plays them all well. She carries the movie almost by herself -- she is in virtually every scene and manages to make us invest in the character. And because of her, we want to find out what happened and how this whole scenario plays out. And Robert LaSardo is never not creepy and menacing.
There are a bunch of negatives, though. As I mentioned, the movie is dialog heavy and I mean that. Loads and loads and LOADS of talking. Reams of exposition come from dialog, much of it just seemingly pulled out of thin air, entire backstories described by random characters in long speeches. Some of what we see doesn't even seem to have much bearing to the story, and at 1 hour and 40 minutes the movie overstays its welcome by a good 10-15 minutes so some editing might have helped. And the movie ends with a "twist" that just leaves up a boatload of unanswered questions and is pretty much impossible based on a lot of what we saw before, so much so that they have the characters try to explain it, and that requires them knowing things they couldn't possibly know.
And there is a technical glitch early on; during the first 15-20 minutes of the movie it appears that all the sound was overdubbed. There is an annoyingly loud score, and the voices are out of synch with the mouth movements juuuuuuuust barely, but enough to notice. This does get completely cleared up, so if you're tempted to shut it off during the beginning because of this, hold on, it gets better.
I have mixed feelings about recommending this movie. It's got enough issues to make it a frustrating watch, but overall I've gotta admit that even though several times I rolled my eyes hard enough to give myself a headache, I was pretty entertained throughout and never got bored. And I don't really ask for much more with low budget flicks, so it gets a lukewarm recommendation. Check it out.
