a disappointment - disjointed, incoherent and silly

Rating: 6/10 (11 July 2002)

I had high hopes for this movie, but left the theatre feeling pretty disappointed. A messy, disjointed script with undistinguished dialogue and a plethora of lazy high-gloss S.F. cliches made for a backside numbing couple of hours.
I *should* love this movie - it was certainly trying to push my buttons as a lover of Blade Runner/Clockwork Orange Brazil/Mission Impossible etc etc, but it just wasn't happening. For me the "futurism" was too unimaginitive for one thing. Desktop computers in the year 2054?! Cars, roads, video projectors, advertising; it all seemed too drearily familiar.
And the whole shebang about the pre-cogs floating in a vat of fluid comes straight out of the "how to make a glossy SF film" book. The one already well-read and better understood by the Matrix guys. Having a whole crime-fighting force based on the powers of essentially one woman (who is described as "sub-human" at one point, and then, half an hour later is walking, talking and making eyes at Tom) seems just too arbitrary and precarious a hook to hang a whole movie on. Suspended disbelief comes crashing down around our shoulders. This is not how the world works - not now, and not in 2054. It smacks of script writers' desperation, as do so many of the movie's twists and turns. It would have been smarter, perhaps, to have the precogs as a whole police department, smart-suited workers, not a trio of bleached newts.
It was, sadly, a waste of a great high-concept pitch, mired in a muddy, silly script and some very uncertain direction. This is the Spielberg who made the dire Lost World, not the Spielberg of Close Encounters or Schindlers List. The theatre, I'm sad to say, rang out with derisory laughter at quite a few points. If only Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Truman Show) had written and directed this one.