A new, dark, edgy Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg?

Rating: 5/10 (20 July 2002)

Just watched Minority Report, and feel strongly enough to have to register my distain.
---WARNING SPOILERS---
Crimes against my afternoon:
The sickening sentimentality straight from a can. Everyone feel sorry for Tom because his child was mudered, as was the Punisher's, John T's in Face/Off, Arnie's in Collateral Damage, Batman lost his parents, Spiderman his uncle. And of course all these masked avengers were gonna turn out to be such nice people, they were all in stable republican-voting nuclear families before they were robbed of their innocence by un/known motiveless psychopaths or in Arnie's case the president of a foreign country????

The tension-free chases, coz of course cruise will escape. Possibly this criticism is a little harsh as without chases without risk of capture T1 and the epic T2 would run to a total of about 2 and a half minutes.
The blatant product placement from American Express, Pepsi, Gap etc.

Two false-endings (one pretty dark) that are usurped by a predictable happy ending, where everything is tied up neatly to allow Cruise to get back together with his ex-wife and live happily ever after
And now worst of all. Exposition. Exposition. Exposition. All seemingly for the benefit of those people who'd been watching a different film in a different screen and have just wandered in. FIRST there are the 'What is future crime?' adverts, which were crap in Starship Troopers and are still cr*p. SECOND, Colin Farrel's Man from the Attorney General's office asking, 'So how does this whole predicting the future thing work?' followed by the kind of mock science b*ll*cks spouted by Liam Neeson when asked 'What exactly are midiclorians?'. THIRDLY, the three minute voice over summing up by TC after the second false ending, where he explains exactly what everyone realised about 15 minutes ago, with the additional help of flashback sequences, for those girls that complained that they didn't get The Matrix.
A new, dark, edgy Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg? My Ars*.