Overlong And Dry

Rating: 5/10 (29 January 2003)

Steven Spielberg's science fiction thriller (based on a short story by Philip K. Dick) is overlong and dry with plot holes too glaring to avoid and with twists so easy to anticipate that all the suspense bleeds out. Tom Cruise (competent in a role tailored to his limitations) plays a cop in a future Washington D.C. who heads a unit that, based on the visions of three seeming autistics, prevents murders before they can occur; when he's implicated in a future murder, the chase begins. The first section is full of didactic bluster as Cruise and a theologian-turned-Justice Department investigator (Colin Farrell, quite good, reminiscent of a young Treat Williams) hash out the moral and spiritual implications of a government preventing acts of free will--a political topic Hollywood superpowers such as Spielberg love to bellow mightily about--and for a while `Minority Report' seems like it's going to be good paranoid fun. But around the time Cruise is forced to go on the lam, Spielberg eschews the philosophizing in favor of run of the mill (if expertly done) chases and fights; when he finally returns to his theme at the end, it seems distant and an afterthought--too much time has elapsed for the earlier discussions to retain any power. With Max von Sydow as Cruise's boss, Samantha Morton as the most important clairvoyant and, in a very funny cameo as an illegally-practicing surgeon, Peter Stormare. The garish, backlit cinematography is by Spielberg's longtime collaborator, Janusz Kaminski.