BIG disappointment...

Rating: 5/10 (21 June 2002)

Okay, "Minority Report." Everyone seems to think this is utterly brilliant, and I can kind of see why: it's certainly the riskiest film Spielberg has made in, well, ever. The visuals are amazingly cool, and the plot is rock solid. So it's a great movie, right?
Good God, no. It's a visually impressive, admittedly challenging motion picture, and is certainly grittier than anything else coming out of Hollywoodland. But it's got some pacing issues, it glosses over subtext that needs more breathing room, and...well...
Let me just say this flat out: there is a chunk in the middle of the movie (I'd guess it's about 30 minutes or so) that was so jarring, hamfisted, incongruous, and thoroughly irritating that I nearly walked out (no mean feat, since I'm paid to watch the whole thing for flaws in the film stock.) I can't really elucidate without some minor spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
The first 30 minutes or so are fantastic, and I was really a little giddy with the prospect of seeing a fully realized, big-budget Sci-Fi mind f*ck. The ideas come fast and thick, the characters may be somewhat clichéd, but not annoyingly so. The film LOOKS great, and the idea is fascinating: why is John Anderton going to kill a man he doesn't even know? Solid, serious, great stuff.
Then the chase sequence kicks in. It's actually a great chase sequence as far as these things go, but, thematically and tonally, this is where Spielberg not only started to lose me, but started to actively annoy me.
It starts, as these things so often do, with vomit. In order to create a distraction to get away from the cops around him, Anderton hits one in the neck with a stun gun, causing the poor guy to vomit. And vomit he does: copiously. Twice. A WHOLE lot of vomit. It's a very quick scene (we're talking less than two seconds,) but it's so VIVID it's jarring. It wasn't until a few seconds after that something occurred to me: was, um...was that supposed to be FUNNY?
I pushed the idea away as ridiculous, but the next 30 to 45 minutes forced me to reconsider. Beginning with the projectile hurl, Spielberg tries what looks to me to be a blend of serious, disturbing, and, er, slapstick. It fails. Spectacularly. At one point we're in a second rate "Blade Runner," with blatantly gratuitous art design (who watches TV on a bedsheet on the wall? Especially in the middle of a fly-by-night operating room?) Why is there a hideously ugly Nazi-esque female nurse humming idiotic tunes and grabbing Tom Cruise's butt? Why do we need to see some guy graphically clear what looks to be a pound and a half of snot from his nose? Why would Spielberg take what was a taut, fascinating action/Sci-Fi blend and stick in a scene of a blinded Tom Cruise gagging on spoiled food, then washing it down with spoiled milk? You can almost hear the trumpet going "wah-wah-wah-waaaaahhh." And what's with making us think that the guy who is operating on Cruise is gong to exact some revenge on him, just to have the whole thing vanish completely 30 seconds later, never to return?
And all this happens after a long, long scene with an old woman tending her plants in a hothouse that has to be the single most hamfisted thing I've seen outside of MST3K. It's a necessary scene, thematically: enormous amounts of information are imparted by a character I'd call "Mrs. Exposition." At first I thought she was simply a horrible actress, but then...she KISSES him. Full on the mouth. It is neither explained, justified, humorous, daring, or anything else coherent I can attribute to it. When she kissed him, I stopped thinking she was a horrible actress: no, her character is just exaggeratedly, needlessly, self-consciously bizarre.
Now, don't get me wrong: weird can quite often be good (I'm an Alexandro Jodorowsky fan, for God sakes.) But this is rootless cinematic masturbation, Spielberg "taking chances" by indiscriminately going outside the realm of what he's good at. Mindless, directionless energy generally doesn't work if your movie's not called "Tetsuo."
As if all of the above weren't off putting enough, at a certain point (right after Cruise saves one of his eyes from rolling away...don't ask) all this "humor" just STOPS. Cold. Suddenly, we're back to the first movie, and if it weren't for the fact that some changes that happened to the character are still present, we might be forgiven for thinking someone at Dreamworks accidentally put some reels from some other film in the cans. At this point, things continue where they left off: plot intricacies winding around each other, and what's with that thing about Anderton killing someone? Y'know, the movie we were so immersed in before?
This is where the pacing and subtext start to dissolve. While the plot has not wrapped itself up yet, things feel like they should end long before they actually do (shades of AI, anyone?) The moral and political implications of the Precrime system are glossed over and all but discarded in favor of making the film a fairly pedestrian, twisty murder mystery (we sat through nearly three hours for that?) It's a long run for a short slide, and the generic God-Is-In-His-Heaven-And-All-Is-Well ending is about the only place it can really go. Yippee. Like we needed another one of these.
Now, I should mention that many of the people present in the theatre loved this. The LOOK of the film is great, and it does have the otherworldly feel that some geeks could immerse themselves in, irregardless of plot (and believe me, I'd have to disregard the plot to lose myself in this.) I'm sure many will disagree with me. Vehemently. I don't really care. I was seriously disappointed, and what's worse, in some ways I was disappointed in EXACTLY the was I afraid I might be. Self-conscious weirdness is not daring or challenging, and I can't help but think that, if Hollywood's output wasn't so uniformly pathetic, people would see through this kind of thing with greater frequency.