Minority Report lacks focus

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2004)

* Major spoilers *
Just watched it and even if it's a decent movie it lacks focus.
With focus I mean: Are they going to portray a sci-fi story or are they making a Sunday after school special with all the funny elements like the fried hamburgers , the rolling eyeballs or why not the whole silly thing about moving your hands in front of those screens?
The first 30 minutes of the film was horrible. I am always very skeptical when I begin watching a movie and I suspect it to be real in that sense that it doesn't have logic errors or lacking realism in general. Of course, in a sci-fi these borders are pushed in contrast to a regular drama. However, when seeing how Cruise moves his hands in front of the screens (which felt like several minutes) I couldn't help myself but saying "Hey - stop already!" It's neither cool nor interesting to see. It WOULD have worked if Cruise would have had some Japanese elegance in his movements, but he hadn't. It simply looked awkward, or the timing between his movements and the images was wrong.
Considering the whole movie, I felt that they tried too hard. This is what I think some of the filmmakers dialogue would have been: "How do we make the future look cool? Well, we use all this cool colored lights pointed at the camera. And we have found out these übercool screens which you control by the movements of your hands." These Hollywood productions often focus on some aspects of the technology too much. They simplify it, tells how it works in a very brief statement and then the audience is to believe it. I didn't.
This film follows the de facto recipe of Hollywood productions. If you know what to look for, you can easily predict what will happen in the film. There are numerous examples: The home video showing Cruise's son, the dialogue about how the eyes can be exchanged to mask ones identity. It's just too obvious that Cruise's son is dead and that he is going to buy a new pair of eyes. When things are too obvious like this - you don't buy the story.
For me, I need a movie to be serious all together to take it seriously, to believe it, to feel one with the story and then give it high ratings because I liked it. When these comic reliefs are added it totally destroys that mystic cool auro of the future that the movie did manage to portray later in the film.
In despite of my critique, the movie wasn't only bad. OK, the car factory plant being there to show off the Lexus didn't really help to get into the annals of best picture, but there were greater moments.
The inventor of the precog was a cool character! She and all her magic surreal plants was a fresh addition to the blasse action elements. The Precog who was on the run was also very interesting. Why? Because it was something new.
All in all the movie was too streamlined and ordinary to be a really good sci-fi, although Cruise's performance and the other highlights mentioned above make it a descent film. But the lack of focus is so sad. Why destroy a promising movie by adding comic relief elements? To answer to the need of having mass market appeal of course, but seriously, I t think this movie would have earned more money in total if it would have stayed serious all through.