The first two-thirds are excellent

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2002)

Spoilers here,
Spielberg movies tend to rehash really conservative plots - the mad scientist overreaching, the swashbuckler on a quest, the buddy movie and so on. Spielberg's inspired moments are what he brings to these old plots. Minority Report is the cop-on-the-run plot. A semi-likable cop is on to something, is framed, runs from the police to a world unfamiliar to him, and then vindicates himself in some big public scene where the guilty party eats crow. It's like Peter Weir's Witness and any number of other movies.
Peter Weir used the cop-on-the-run plot to show his cop trying to move through a world where his violence and way of living were completely rejected. In the best parts of Minority Report Spielberg shows his cop on the run from a world where civil liberties and free will no longer exist. Throughout the film there is the ominous presence of a diseased nanny state that probes into the homes and bodies of its citizens. At the beginning of the movie's action, the state has finally probed into the mind, into the very intent to commit an act. Spielberg brings this awesomely dark vision of society home with the metaphorical `family.' Von Sydow's Burgess character and Smith's Dr. Hineman characters make several references to themselves as the parents of the `precogs.' There is much discussion of their status as wards of Burgess and the eerie history of their abilities - born with nightmarish visions of impending murders as a result of the drug abuse of their parents. Instead of curing them of this horrific condition, Hineman and Burgess keep them in a big tub of drugs to harvest their nightmares. Without a doubt, it's the most ghoulish vision Spielberg has conjured up.
And this theme continues when Cruise's Anderton character is taken on a tour of the people he's had incarcerated. Once under the complete control of the state, they suffer a fate very similar to the precogs - suspended in a tank with the brain still running. The implication of the subplot (of Pre-Crime going national) is that this is where we will all be, as people surrender to the encroaching state. For the first two thirds of the film, it seem that machines are constantly crawling into people's eyes and into their brains.
There was a lot in the film that I liked. The special effects in Minority Report were excellent, imaginative and made the world of the movie seem bigger. The breathtaking DC commute and entry to Anderton's condo looked like they came from one, consistent world (Where Attack of the Clones invariably looked like a bunch of people wandering around a green stage clearly smaller than the jumbled action).
The action sequences were exciting and really brought home the idea that Anderton may be a pre-crime cop as much for the thrill of the chase as stopping the crimes that took his son.
The casting was great and the writing had a couple of gems in it.
The only problem with Minority Report is that, like AI, the last third sucked. There is a line about how all your dreams come true once you've been incarcerated in the tube, but that's not really enough. It's Spielberg trying to have it both ways - a dark movie and a longer conventional one. As I mentioned at the beginning, the plot is the most standard thing about Minority Report. The last half hour relies almost completely on a plot that is really really worn out. I think it's safe to say that we all knew that Burgess was behind the setup. I think we all knew that Burgess would be unmasked in front of everyone (I felt like I was watching The Fugitive again, which is the same plot with a hunter-and-hunted plot thrown in). Watching it get played out was boring. The development of the eye theme, the free will convolutions, and all the wonderful fx just stopped for the last half hour in order to make room for a perfunctory happy ending.