McKee was wrong: you don't need a great final act.

Rating: 8/10 (9 January 2004)

This film has a fascinating and original premise which is unfortunately not explored to its full potential, but also contains some of the most intelligent and visionary future actualisation ever brought to the cinema screen. Amazingly full of non-Spielbergian features - such as after a hard and successful day's precrime fighting, our protagonist is then immediately shown buying and taking drugs, or the lascivious kiss suddenly planted on John Anderton by the elderly Dr. Hineman - the film nonetheless contrives to remind you who the director is at certain points, like the schmaltzy final shot or the lack of nudity when displaying male fantasy images. Those elements aside the entire film works as a much better Kubrick homage than the mawkish A.I.
As others have mentioned, the film sometimes doesn't know what it should be pursuing as a theme. The sheer injustice of arresting and imprisoning (apparently without due process) people who haven't even committed any crimes does not seem to come into the purview of the script, which seems to decide that the injustice arises when one of the three pre-cogs disagrees with the other two, and that the inventors of the system arbitrarily had such "Minority Reports" summarily and automatically wiped from the "testimony". Witwer (Farrell) represents the "enemy", the villainous Attorney General who wants John Anderton and Burgess out of their jobs - oh, wait, that means he must be on the side of Justice and the American Constitution. Hang on, no, it's OK, he wants them out on their ears, but he wants to make PreCrime national, so it's alright to hate him. No, now I'm confused because it looks like he's a hero again! I guess that's not a bad set of ambiguities for a character, now I come to think of it. Incidentally, Witwer's name adds to the general atmosphere of bereavement (Alderton has lost his son, and the precogs have been deprived of a normal life) - Witwer is German for "widower".
Very few films in the supposed Science Fiction genre have been so clear-eyed and intelligent in their depiction of the future. Of *course* all the major advances in science and technology are going to be put to the advantage of marketing and the benefit of the large corporations (although I do think that in 50 years time the TV show "Cops" might actually have changed its theme song - "Bad Boys" by then being regarded as classical music, presumably). Unfortunately, some of this technology is so perfect and seamless that the only way out of Anderton's obstacles for the scriptwriters involved them having to dig enormous holes in the plot. It is simply not credible that the security checks did not remove Anderton as "authorised personnel" the second he started running. This led to the enormous implausibility that 2054's state-of-the-art "deep freeze" prison can effectively be broken out of with the aid of one person wielding a gun. There were other problems, too, like the fact that three murders successfully take place during the course of the movie, despite the oft-stated claim that the Precrime department have stopped all murders for six years. Could the cops only get there on time if Tom Cruise was with them? So it seems...
So, what did I mean by my subtitle? If you've seen Adaptation, the legendary script guru Robert McKee appears as a character and expounds some of his theory of scriptwriting to Charlie Kaufman: "I'll tell you a secret. The last act makes the film. Wow them in the end, and you've got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you've got a hit. Find an ending, but don't cheat, and don't you dare bring in a deus ex machina." Minority Report is the movie that proves that this is actually nonsense. If there's a good enough premise and you can get a more than exciting trailer out of the main body of the movie, your last act can be utter rubbish, as is the case here. All the "Wows" in this movie come before Anderton's arrest - after that it really does get a little ho-hum. They even made a terrible bosh of the ex-wife, upgrading a minor character, introduced sometime in the middle of the movie, into a major protagonist?? But the public forgave that and everything else and gave this movie a certain success.
Tom Cruise does a very good job with good strong support, at least partly because he handles the little touches of humour very well, and (for once) is not afraid to look a little silly, as when he chases his own eyeballs down a corridor.
Samantha Morton is an absolute revelation and absolutely un-missable. You literally cannot take your eyes off her whenever she appears. This is another reason for the failure of the last act, since she is off screen for most of it.
"Wait........ wait.............. wait.........."