Billiard Balls Tell the Future

Rating: Null/10 (7 July 2002)

Spoilers. *** What is this movie about? Three people who can tell the future hang out all day in a swimming pool wearing fancy leotards, as everyone seems to wear in futuristic films. What are they doing in the pool? Foretelling the future! That's all they do, all day! How did they get that way? Their mothers used drugs when they were pregnant. (This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs-- hey, you can see the future!) What do they see about the future? Just the murders. How do they communicate that information to the people who are not in the swimming pool? By sending vibes to a machine that makes billiard balls that say the names of the victims and killers. Okay, are you with me so far?
And Tom Cruise is the guy who takes the balls and goes and catches the killers before they kill. (He's got em by the balls) When they catch the almost-killers, they put stereo headphones on them and put them into some kind of deep freeze. Works like a charm, every time. But then one day the billiard ball says Tom Cruise is the killer, and he runs away and causes a big raucous so he won't get caught.
There are lots of great moments in the movie. Tom goes to get his eyeballs removed and replaced, and he ends out accidentally eating a bad sandwich. He goes on a long chase scene, with cops who are flying on little gizmos- it is a scene so much like the Harry Potter Quidditch scene! For some unknown reason, the chase scene ends out in a car manufacturing plant- and Tom is tossed and turned and banged around, but drives off in the brand new car that was just created around him. And of course, like in every worthy movie, he can't just drive in the car, but has the sudden need to jump from car to car on a busy vertical expressway.
There is so much weird stuff, dumb stuff, scary stuff, and stuff that doesn't add up in this movie. The movie is a political allegory, turned into an action picture. The whole theme is You have a choice. Even if your future is supposedly predetermined, you have a choice. That is a worthy theme, and one people should take to heart.
Things you will see in this movie: A dirty bathtub. Very fancy public housing. A man with holes in his head. A rooftop scene reminiscent of Vanilla Sky. A mad doctor scene reminiscent of Rocky Horror Picture Show. A federal agent who carries a rosary -- come on! A pool boy who takes his job seriously. People who feel totally trapped by the totalitarian system in their city, but who don't just drive away to a different place. A laugh-out-loud funny scene about The Gap. Product placement every ten seconds. A scene with a strange old lady with lots of plants, kind of a cross between Harold and Maude and Dr. Who. A man about to kill his wife, where you find yourself cheering for the man, and are sad when he gets caught. A futuristic world, where everything is all modern, except the playgrounds in the park still have equipment leftover from the 1950s. A woman who can foretell the future, but when she's in the swimming pool, she can only see murders, not even rapes or other attacks. But when she's out in a shopping mall, hey, she knows every move everyone is going to make, including the balloon man. That just shows the deep powers inherent in any shopping mall.

What's weird? The premise of a plot, where an official would go to complicated technical lengths to beat the crime-detection system in order to murder a woman, when he could just take the woman out of the city and kill her anywhere else in America. What else? The fact they want to make the pre-cog system nationwide, when the system relies on children of drug addicts. So are they going to have to encourage women all over the nation to be drug addicts? I guess so, so there are enough pre-cogs for all 50 states.

And do the pre-cogs ever eat? And does their skin get all wrinkled from being in the pool all day? And why do they have to wear matching suits? And why are the pre-cogs sending secret messages to billiard balls, instead of basketballs or ping-pong balls, or even baseball bats? And do the cops shoot pool with the balls once they've finished catching enough killers? Maybe as the program expands to the 50 states, they could have the pre-cogs in each state send messages to make a different piece of sports equipment. New York pre-cogs could make baseballs, while Ohio pre-cogs could make volleyball nets, while Alaska pre-cogs could make squash racquets. That way, they could supply schools all around America with enough new sports equipment, so the children could work off their frustrations, so they don't grow up to be would-be killers. Now there's a plan!