Almost great

Rating: 6/10 (24 June 2002)

For most of its length Minority report ranks with Steven Spielberg's very best work. It's imaginative, dark and occasionally thrilling, with one or two sequences worthy of Hitchcock were he to make a sci fi version of one of his wrong man scenarios. Then you get to the last twenty minutes, which are dreadful. Not only does Spielberg seem unable or unwilling to allow one of his movies to have a dark or disturbing ending but he can't even allow a potentially upsetting thread to remain hanging. Instead the bad guy has to get caught, the good guy has to be vindicated, he has to repair his relationship with his estranged wife and she has to be expecting, the future crime program has to be terminated and the precogs have to be shown to be leaving satisfying lives. Yuck. The ending is ludicrous and betrays everything that the first two hours of the movie had accomplished.