Future imperfect

Rating: 6/10 (26 May 2013)

With a typically imaginative future-set sci-fi story by Philip K Dick, an A-list cast with Tom Cruise in the lead and Steven Spielberg as director, this big-budget feature looks great on paper. The story's good too, in these days of zero-tolerance towards crime, the idea of stopping a murder before it's actually committed is ingenious and the demonstration of the Pre-Crime Unit in action, effectively the film's prologue, is great as Tom Cruise and his team race against the clock to stop a crime of passion double-murder.
I also liked the fact that the operation was subject to moral and indeed legal scrutiny, in the form of government busybody Colin Farrell, but the main story, and the excuse for Cruise to do his running man schtick one more time is when the system inexplicably turns on him, triggering the obligatory extended chase and action sequences which for me take up too much of the story, spectacle over content. I didn't even think the SFX were that good, especially Cruise's John Anderton's gravity-defying first escape from his pursuers, plus the product-placement to which the viewer is subliminally subjected is outrageously excessive. In addition it was too easy to pick out the real bad guy and I even predicted, without "pre-cog", the give-away line before it was said, making the ending somewhat predictable.
There's not much call for great acting here, Cruise doing action-hero better than bereaved parent, Max Van Sydow, looking and sounding like John Huston, but without the devil-meant while Farrell probably comes off best, but is dispensed with too soon and somewhat unnecessarily I thought.
I think that under all the flash-bang-wallop that Spielberg employs here there was a leaner, darker, better film trying to get out. Perhaps if he'd pre-cogged the final cut himself, he might not have blocked his own buster.