A serial killer thriller without an original bone in its body tracks down a copycat on streaming

The serial killer thriller remains one of the most consistently popular genres available to film, television, or streaming audiences, so it’s not a shock to find out that director Mauro Borrelli’s Mindcage has become one of the top-viewed on-demand movies this week.

Per FlixPatrol, the hard-boiled psychological procedural is one of the 10 biggest hits among Amazon customers in the United States, while on a global scale it’s also managed to infiltrate the charts of iTunes, Google Play Movies, and Rakuten. That points to widespread success, then, it’s just a shame the slow-burning throwback doesn’t have an original bone in its body.

Technically it does, but you’re not going to hear anybody shouting from the rooftops about an exceedingly rare dramatic performance from Martin Lawrence, probably because you’ll be too busy thinking about the raft of blatantly similar titles that have dealt with the same rough concept and executed it significantly better.

When a copycat murderer begins leaving a trail of bodies behind, a pair of hard-boiled detectives seek advice from the original culprit, played with scenery-chewing relish by John Malkovich. From there, a cat-and-mouse game with deadly consequences inevitably rises, with the simplest way to describe Mindcage probably being The Silence of the Se7en, except nowhere near the same rarefied air as Jonathan Demme and David Fincher’s stone-cold classics.

It’s a thriller about a string of grisly and intricate murders, though, so it was always destined to find a crowd given the undying love for the medium.