Majority rules on `Minority Report'

Rating: 6/10 (25 August 2002)

So, the third of the four must-sees this summer movie season is out (Spider-Man, Attack of the Clones, this, Men In Black II) and I saw it last night. With all the buzz about this flick being Steven Speilberg's best movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark, I felt as if I should've been standing in line on opening night. I mean, that's pretty tall talk to be better than Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List. Truth be told, I was almost willing to pay the $7.50 just to see the Daredevil and Red Dragon trailers. As for the main feature, the verdict is good. Yes, I said `good.' Well, I'll even go so far as to say `pretty darn good,' but certainly not `Speilberg's best since 'Raiders'.' Just `pretty darn good.'

The premise is by now well known: Washington, D.C. in the year 2054 has an experimental program in which murders are foreseen by mutated precognitives and potential perpetrators are arrested before their crime can be committed. The constitutional arguments are also pretty well known by now, but I don't have any intention of getting into a monologue about that, as the issue is covered in the movie and it's the movie I'm here to discuss. Tom Cruise's policeman John Anderton is the chief of the `Precrime' department of the D.C. Police, and has a zeal for the program stemming from the disappearance of his 6-year old son in the days before the Precrime program. When a representative of the Justice Dept. arrives to try to poke holes in the program's premise before the it's instituted nationally, Anderton is told by his boss, played by Max Von Sydow, to accommodate him. The next thing we know, the `precogs' foresee Anderton committing a murder in less then three days' time, and the chase is on . . .
Cruise once again displays his mastery of the `cold' acting method. As he did to perfection in `Jerry Maguire' and `Born on the Fourth of July' (but for some strange reason abandoned in `Vanilla Sky'), he relates his character's anguish, anxiety, terror, etc., through subtle stares, sparse dialogue and body language. No ranting and raving, no overly preachy stretches of dialogue; just a look in the right place here and a sentence under the breath there, and the audience gets the idea. Staring at and speaking in unison with home-movie holograms and hobbling about his home strung out on inhaled illegal drugs, Anderton displays to us his personal misery, then returns to dedicated professionalism at the station-house the next day. He does a fine job of carrying this movie. Colin Farrell (who will play Bullseye in Daredevil next year) does a great job as the Justice Dept. errand-boy, playing him with just the right amount of swarminess (is that a word?) and intelligence. Von Sydow's performance is terrific as well, and his role here continues the summer's theme of taking `senior' movie veterans and making wonderful use of them (Cliff Robertson in Spider-Man, Christopher Lee in Attack of the Clones).
The visuals here are terrific. The vision of Washington, D.C. 52 years from now is more believable than Blade Runner's prediction for Los Angeles of 2016. The architecture and technology are not so omnipresent in the Capitol that we don't see life as we might would lead it. With the exception of the superhighways, the technology depicted in the movie is a garnish to life at that time. The bluish tint that Spielberg gives the film casts an almost sterile hue to the world we see there, such that blood, when spilled, is all the more garish to see. I thought it was an interesting touch. The sick-sticks and retina-scanning spider-robot bloodhounds used by law enforcement of the day were absolutely creepy. The personalized advertisements and greetings depicted here instantly made me think of the crap accumulating in my e-mail box every day (lasmoak, give your lover a larger . . . or lasmoak, mortgage rates are now . . .), and this hitting-me-close-to-home gave a lot of other things in the movie credibility. This movie shows us a world where fantasies can be lived out in a chamber is a lot closer than the holodecks of Star Trek.
Okay, the story. It's good. Yes, I even said it was pretty good. This film isn't a big-budget, slam-bang modern American Action Movie, and with good reason: It isn't supposed to be. It is big-budget, don't get me wrong, and it's all on the screen. The visuals and the effects are terrific, and they enhance, not overpower, the plot. This movie is a lot more cerebral than I expected, and that's always a welcome surprise in today's movies. I confess that I wasn't prepared for the film-noir pace of the movie, as hearing all this comparison to `Raiders' had me set for a trill-a-minute-type spectacle. Well, it ain't that, but it's good nonetheless. Yes, the movie's 2 hours and 20 minutes, but I promise you that it doesn't feel like it. Speilberg once again tells us a marvelous story, this one being expanded from a short story by Philip K. Dick, the author behind the works inspiring Blade Runner and Total Recall. The clues unfold, the suspects sometimes surprise us and the confrontation at the end is not one easily predicted, despite it having been foreseen by the precogs (figure that one out for yourself).
This is one to see, and while it ain't Raiders, it sure as heck beats Scooby-Doo.