Nothing infuriates me more than a botched film with a great deal of promise. Like a grade school teacher might say, what most rankles is wasted potential. Both a possible genius and promising star athlete, Minority Report skulks in the back of class 75 pounds overweight with only a mouth that’s smart. Messy and uneven, the only thing that says Spielberg is the failed father complex.
The picture jumps off with a solid sci-fi concept. A trio of psychic “pre-cogs” power the murder forecasting abilities of Washington DC’s PreCrime unit in the year 2054. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) must sift through the vision fragments from the seers, grab the important elements, and stop the predicted murder. All is fine and good until a vision comes through that implicates Anderton as a murderer. Of course, Anderton runs and while on the lam has the time to unravel the mystery.
The PreCrime concept holds promise, but it’s just a shiny paint job on a jalopy assembled from bits and pieces that we’ve seen a thousand times before. Sci-fi retreads of played action movie clichés abound. Trapped on the freeway of the future, we get the same ‘get out and jump from roof to roof’ action we’re used to. One fugitive can evade seven cops even after being cornered in an alley, but this time the cops have jet packs. We’ve seen it all before, but this time it’s in a streamlined world’s fair city of the future.
Even more than the been-there-done-that problems, this picture chokes on the same brand of poison that ruined Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom – unnecessary, forced comedy. Nothing ruins the mood of a conspiracy action flick like your lead chasing his dropped keys down into a sewer grate. While such moments can serve a purpose, they do nothing in this configuration but waste time and elicit groans from a tired audience.
When a picture strives to leave the people breathless there is no greater crime then to overstay your welcome. Minority Report passes up about three endings in order to make everyone happy. There’s the noir ending, the avenging wife ending, and the ‘it was all part of the plan’ type ending, but even after all of those we are still patronized with a childish epilogue. One should never have to think “Oh God, there’s more,” much less have to think that two or three times.
Sadly the few good parts of the film are self-contained and for the most part don’t actually help the plot. When this picture gets to DVD there will be a few priceless chapters, but the film as a whole is a muddle. Lois Smith gets to do a cross between the orchid house scene in The Big Sleep and the ‘Find The Girl’ scene from Chinatown, but except for a tiny piece of information that could have been fed much less clumsily, the scene has nothing to do with the film in general.
I’m sure that if you were already going to check out this picture there’s nothing I can say to dissuade you, but if you’re on the fence let me push you into the yard of “wait for video.” Now that Spielberg has finished film school, maybe he can get back to work with some focus.
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