Reedy vocal tones from John Malkovich lend themselves to The Artist, a villain as wispy and incomprehensible as the man playing him. Easy it may be to write Mindcage off as a feature desperately clawing at Silence of the Lambs, it would be insulting to the latter to say so. Mindcage comes nowhere close to the Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins thrills and instead confines Malkovich to dimly lit exposition and religiously-fuelled cell living. Feeling closer to the summary and state of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace than a profound and clearly religiously motivated feature, Mindcage is a fascinatingly dated feature that applies most of its influences clearly and plainly.
Constantine covers the divine nature of this Martin Lawrence-led feature. Not quite Bad Boys For Life, is it? Not so buddy cop, but Lawrence’s sluggish lead performance does little for the pacing of this Mauro Borrelli-directed feature. Borrelli’s clear lack of pacing, his frustratingly obvious indicators for the personal lives of Mary Kelly (Melissa Roxburgh) and the bleed-over into work presented through Jake Doyle (Lawrence). Running like a movie ready-made for TCM and never having a voice of its own, Mindcage has a greyed colour scheme and unprecedented attention to detail in its colourful cadavers, dressed up in remarkable attire. Eeriness is not possible when the camera is a snot green and dullard grey though, it removes the atmosphere. But there was no atmosphere to begin with as Mindcage struggles with the presence of its few moving parts.
A showreel of comparisons can be made from just about every hint of the ghoulish true crime genre to the fictionalised look back at those moments that made it possible to begin with. Mindcage has no identity of its own but marks some extreme close-ups and gruesome, occult-like momentum that brings out a copycat killer subplot where imagery is key and the only thing interesting within. Roxburgh and Malkovich have a number of back-and-forth scenes where Borrelli tries and fails to pass off these encounters as unique. Foster and Hopkins spring to mind. Even without separating from that, paying homage or even staying the course with some solid dialogue would have been acceptable. Mindcage can do neither as the performers find themselves flicking onto autopilot. Who can blame them?
Mindcage feels like this or that because it fails to present anything that could be identified as unique to this Lawrence-led feature. Parts of Da Vinci Code, hints of Silence of the Lambs, notations of Hannibal. Does that come from clear guidance from those influences or a chase for the feel of tone they presented? Neither. Borrelli has seen what worked before his time to shine and tried to staple them together with notations of the divine and the surge of interest there could be in that. Unfortunately, he forgets to implement any of it into an understandable or engaging plot. What would have worked as a half-decent Criminal Minds double feature is instead stretched to breaking point, pumped full of actors far from their apex. That is how features like Mindcage come about.
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