A Disappointing "Report" Card

Rating: 2/10 (1 July 2002)

***SLIGHT SPOILERS*** It's easy to see why the critics have been doing hand-springs for the mediocre "Minority Report" - another dud for Spielberg (and a second bomb, after "Vanilla Sky", for its star, Tom Cruise) could begin to impact both of their high-flying careers. And Spielberg has, in recent years, become something of a middle-brow human revival house: he's made two David Lean movies ("Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan"), followed by a Stanley Kubrick movie ("A.I."), without ever really forging his own style or perspective (while taking breathers with the "Jurassic Parks", which were just family-sweetened "Jaws" rehashes).
In artistic terms, Spielberg's been running on empty for as long as twenty years (since his last good-all-the-way-through movie, "E.T."), and at some base level, everybody knows he's leveraged to the hilt - but he can still put together dazzlingly kinetic sequences (D-Day in "Ryan"; the attack on the Jewish ghetto in "Schindler") that give the audience something to like. It doesn't matter that "Ryan" and "Schindler" can't come close to Lean, or that "A.I." basically rewrote - and botched - Kubrick's ironic ending. They SEEM like the old kind of popular, yet artistically successful movies; we can pretend they are, at any rate - and that's worth something. With Spielberg in serious decline - and Sam Raimi waiting in the wings - the whole boomer 70s Hollywood balloon seems somehow in jeopardy.
And so the laurels are thrown for a movie far more muddled than "A.I.", but not nearly as interesting. Spielberg has drenched "Minority Report" in a grainy, silvery light, as if we were watching the whole thing reflected on chrome - obviously we're supposed to be like one of his "pre-cogs", dreaming the future in a silvery secret sauce. The film is based on a Philip K. Dick short story, but Dick would probably do a few revolutions in his grave if he saw it. His amusing, paradoxical idea (of stopping crime by seeing into the future and preventing murders, but then prosecuting the would-be killers anyway) has been extended far, far beyond its limited ability to distract us. As he demonstrated in "Ryan", Spielberg seems to believe that he can inflate even slim ironies and paradoxes into two hour-plus meditations. Alas, he can't.
At least "Ryan" was founded on a real (if small) irony; but from the beginning we sense problems with "Minority Report"'s "paradox". After all, if the pre-cogs are really seeing "the future", shouldn't they see the police bursting in and STOPPING the crime, too? In fact, the police could save themselves a whole lot of detective work by just shouting out the address when they arrive (which they would hear back in the past) so they'd know exactly where to go. For some reason, of course, the "pre-cogs" are dreaming an ALTERNATE future, which takes into account the murderer's free will, but not the intervention of the police, or the pre-cogs themselves. This isn't a "paradox" - it's just not thought all the way through.
Oh, well - we're willing to ignore this, of course, if the movie can tease out some interesting thematic material from its premise. But it can't. After the initial souped-up chase, and the shocking twist! (Cruise is fingered as the next murderer), the movie begins to pile on the filler: technology that's not quite interesting enough, half-baked plot strands that are then dropped (like the back story of Cruise's eye surgeon), and long, expository scenes alternating with chase after chase through a future world not nearly as interesting as the one in "A.I.", much less "Blade Runner". Meanwhile the themes of justice and free will seem to be put on permanent hold as the action-picture gears begin to grind.
But even as we're puzzling over the non-paradoxical paradox of the pre-cogs, we can't help but notice that the main plot is a mess, too. (SPOILER ALERT.) Cruise's simple backstory, for example, is so heavily underlined that we have no trouble guessing exactly why he might want to murder someone (you feel like a pre-cog in more ways than one while you're watching this movie). We expect, of course, that he'll realize this himself as he gets his come-uppance - and maybe a little self-awareness in the process, too. But no. He ends up on top o' the world, without even a dent in that orthodontically-enhanced smile. Likewise, we expect, after a lengthy sequence in which he's chased by digital spiders trying to scan his newly-implanted retinas, that he'll be at least partly blinded by the experience ("King Lear", anyone?). But again, no. The movie works up a whole "vision" theme, then drops it with a clunk (Cruise drops his old eyeballs, too).
The movie does right itself, briefly, when Cruise arrives at the murder scene, with a pale, shivering pre-cog (Samantha Morton) in tow. For a few minutes, the omens and portents of her dreams (the man in sun-glasses turning out to be a billboard, the creepily-laughing woman with a pipe) play out with a genuine chill.
But alas, once THIS plot has been resolved, we're off and running with a SECOND plot even less convincing than the first. Of course Cruise was "set up" by someone, and if you can't guess who, you really need to see more movies (or at least "The Fugitive" and "L.A. Confidential"). Colin Farrell's on hand as the handsome red herring (in the process demonstrating an easy charisma that almost blows Cruise off the screen), but he's soon disposed of, too - and by now the plot mechanics are SO awkward that the only suspense lies in wondering just how much they think we'll swallow. The very pretext of Von Sydow's vast set-up is ridiculous: Morton grabs Cruise for a split second as a few obscure images splash over her screen - hardly enough to make Von Sydow immediately jump to murdering Cruise, which wouldn't solve the problem anyway (the problem is Morton!). And how did the set-up work, anyway? How did Von Sydow know Cruise would eventually FIND the set-up, for Morton to dream about, since he wouldn't know about it UNTIL Morton dreamed - oh, fuggeddaboudit! Then there's the issue of exactly what the "minority report" is supposed to BE. First we're led to believe that it will exonerate Cruise, then we learn it doesn't really exist, then we think it DOES exist about another murder, but then we learn that the evidence is really a bit of pre-cog "deja vu", not a minority report at all. Uh - what?
Clearly, as is his wont, Spielberg's been rewriting on the fly, and the results (as in "Ryan" and "A.I.") are a tangled mess. Why can't this guy respect the parameters of a genuine story, and just leave well enough alone? Steve, you're a DIRECTOR, not a writer! You're good at effects, not ideas! It would probably be a good thing if "Minority Report" bombed (I think after a huge opening weekend it will taper off significantly) - but only if Spielberg could be made to understand WHY it bombed. But that of course will probably never happen. Bring on Sam Raimi!