What a sell-out ending

Rating: 5/10 (24 June 2002)

Max Von Sydow is smart enough to come up with the crime of the century...imagine all the years of work that must have gone into planning the murder of Ann Lively so that the psychics would be fooled. Imagine how complicated (and brilliant) his plan was to ruin and frame Tom Cruise. When he shoots the FBI guy, he got away with it because he did so while the psychics were not functioning. He is a criminal genius who plans and details his murders oh so precisely. He's kept his mouth shut all these years and then at the ending...when Spielberg cannot come up with anything better...Von Sydow accidentally makes a slip of the tongue and mentions the drowning. This is such a simple, cliched way to "catch" a bad guy and has been done a million times. Such unoriginaility. He basically confessed. We're led to believe how smart he's been for years and years, and then Spielberg wants us to believe that he would just come out and be so stupid as to reveal his knowledge of the drowning. Terrible, terrible writing.