Not great, but not bad either

Rating: 6/10 (12 December 2003)

Minor potential spoilers ahead.
Having read the original short story I was naturally curious about the film adaptation. The premise is identical in both: some time in the future the police is able to virtually eliminate murders by using "precogs", mutant humans with the ability to foretell the future, to predict the crime, and arresting the perpetrator before he can carry it out.
From this sci-fi setting, a number of interesting questions arise - is it justifiable to arrest someone who has not actually committed a crime yet? Is the future fixed, or are there alternate paths, leaving individuals a choice whether to actually go through with the crime? The short story explores some of the issues through a neat little paradox: the head of police is accused of future murder of a man he has never heard of; we follow his actions until the paradox is cleverly resolved in the end.
The movie quickly diverges from the events in the short story; apparently the writers thought it would not fill a two-hour movie. Sadly, one gets the feeling that the script has been rewritten once too often; it has a tendency to meander aimlessly, unable to decide what the central issue should be and how it should be resolved. The plot twists and turns, but it is not entirely consistent. Some plotholes are obvious, e.g. letting a wanted criminal wander into the police headquarters and give his identity without having him stopped by anyone. One of the more subtle oddities that result from the storyline engineering is that no actual minority report is of any significance in the film (although for a brief period we are led to believe that it might be).
"Minority Report" also fails to decide what kind of movie it wants to be. It establishes a setting in the future, aided by CGI visuals that are competent, but do not convey a sense of novelty - it's all been done before. We are shown some action scenes that feel rather isolated and do not advance the plot, and there is a good deal of exploration of the central character's personal history. In the end, however, it settles on a "whodunnit" mystery (with a rather timeworn ending). The sci-fi setting becomes incidental as the short story's elegant paradox is thrown overboard and replaced with something that is effectively no more than a contrivance (i.e. the "echoes" concept).
It is to the movie's credit that it addresses the issue of the treatment of the three precogs, who are effectively kept like animals - a problem entirely ignored by the short story. The strongest character here actually turns out to be Agatha, the leader of the three.
On the whole, this is an entertaining way to spend 2 hours and a bit, but the movie does not achieve its full potential.