One of Spielberg's Worst

Rating: 3/10 (5 June 2017)

The film poses the question: is one guilty of a crime they will (?) commit in the future? Pleasantly surprised to see Steven Spielberg was directing, the movie soon turned into one of Spielberg's worst. Resorting to the typical action chase sequences popularized by The French Connection (1971), it becomes the mindless slobber of the masses, starring Tom Cruise. And Tom Cruise, who rather than pull off another Magnolia (1999) level performance, devolves to the emotionless action hero, a la Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film that starts off as an intriguing moral debate morphs to the action movie formula, including long, improbable, and exciting chase scenes; huge government conspiracies; and a false climax, or twist with no cinematic purpose whatsoever. A movie, whose moral question could've been answered earlier, stretches into a 2 and a half hour fiasco with an answer at the end to a question proposed at the beginning - with no further development throughout the interim. Despite the film's fantastic sets and artistic development, predicting a beautiful Utopian future, the movie becomes one of improbabilities and unrealistic expectations. The title itself, which upon introduction, seems to integrate itself perfectly into the story as a plot, development, and thematic device, instead fading out of conscience into the abyss of fodder action flicks. With a mystery half-explored - half left in the annals of cinematic nothingness (along with the rest of the potential of the film) and the other half being the more exciting and action flick-acceptable â€“ the movie is content with a weak answer to a weak question. The viewer shouldn't be. In a noble pursuit, Spielberg attempts to attack a system, much like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); however, he attacks an imaginary system to come to an imaginary answer for the imaginary question. His noble pursuit, instead of flying across the Atlantic like Charles Lindbergh, crosses a gargantuan gorge on a wooden bridge with no bottom, plummeting into the crocodile-infested waters below. The legendary Indiana Jones may have been able to do it, but not John Anderton of Minority Report. Kudos to the set; kudos to the attempt; failure otherwise.