I See Potential Dead People

Rating: 8/10 (21 August 2002)

Reportedly, at some stage of its life, "Minority Report", based on a Philip K. Dick short story of the same name, was being developed by Paul Verhoeven as "Total Recall 2", which would connect the pre-cogs of "Report" with the psychic Martian mutants of "Recall". Spielberg's is a better movie than that one would have been, but still fails to be quite as good as its potential.
It's 2054, and the notoriously lawless District of Columbia has become a tranquil place, largely through the efforts of the Precrime Division of the D.C. Metropolitan Police (which, to judge from the sleek Precrime HQ, got a major funding increase at some point). The cops of Precrime, led by Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise), intervene in murders before they happen. They can do this courtesy of the pre-cogs, a trio of clairvoyant savants who spend their days sedated in a pool of nutri-muck, receiving images of future violent deaths, along with the names of the victims and perpetrators (the pre-cogs are named, in a cute but obvious touch, Arthur, Dashiell, and Agatha). The cops analyze the images to determine where the killing will happen, then zip to the scene in a hovercraft that looks like a cross between Boba Fett's Slave-1 and a malevolent seashell, nabbing the killer before the victim's blood is shed. The offender is then locked up (there's no trial; after all, the pre-cogs are never wrong) in a suspended-animation prison.
Precrime has been such a success that there is interest in expanding it nationwide (how they will do this with only three pre-cogs is never clear), and Anderton and his mentor (Max Von Sydow) are visited by an unctuous federal agent (a creepy but charismatic Colin Farrell) who is examining the Precrime program for flaws that might compromise public trust. And soon, Anderton has serious problems of his own: the pre-cogs finger him, for the murder of a man he has never met. He makes a run for it, trying to dodge his colleagues and find out what's going on. Someone has set him up and he doesn't know why, but it may have to do with an old Precrime case that keeps turning up like a bad penny.
Visually, the movie is stunning. Spielberg fills his future world with fascinating stuff, alternately awe-inspiring and unsettling: roads are choked with aerodynamic cars that drive up the sides of buildings. Passive retinal scanners in public places identify you as you walk by, generating slick commercials that call out to you by name (public ID checkers and their effects on fugitives also cropped up in last spring's "Impostor", itself based on a Dick story), while a shopping center's walls teem with ghostly animated ads. In another memorable sequence, the residents of a government housing block stop whatever they are doing to submit to the attentions of "spiders", tiny self-guiding retinal scanners on spindly legs, which almost become characters in their own right (one, for instance, seems to be a bit smarter than the others).
Unfortunately, Spielberg is unable to contain his puckishness, and the action scenes are staged with a liberal dose of slapstick humor. It's nice that Spielberg doesn't take himself too seriously (there was a whiff of that in "A.I.") but it doesn't fit with the solemn tone of the proceedings. It's as if Tom Hanks had, in the midst of "Saving Private Ryan", pulled out a bullwhip and hitched a ride on a Wehrmacht truck. "Minority Report" raises a lot of heavy Orwellian questions, but it's far more eager to play than think.
Tom Cruise is probably the only Hollywood leading man to get this far in his career without ever playing a cop. It's sort of strange: with his clean-cut, chiseled features and clipped line deliveries, he's a natural for it. He plays Anderton with believable, brisk competence, and he looks appropriately like the Brave Man of the Shiny New Future, but we don't really get from Cruise the inner turmoil that others describe in Anderton. When he has a moment of unhinged emotion, we sort of wonder where it came from. It would have been interesting to see what someone like Ed Harris would have done with this role.
Anderton grabs a pre-cog (the female, natch) to help him find the truth. Samantha Morton's Agatha is a haunting and delicate presence as that sci-fi staple, the innocent with great power (the religious overtones of the pre-cogs are hinted at repeatedly, especially in the funny reaction of a sleazy virtual-memory dealer upon meeting Agatha). When Morton gives voice to her visions, and pleads fruitlessly not to see them fulfilled, we have the sense of someone with an awesome and terrible gift. Still, I think it's safe to say that Sinead O'Connor has pretty much killed the buzz-cut look for women.
Other bright spots in the cast: Tim Blake Nelson has a quirky turn as Gideon, the warden and sole staff member of the coma-prison (itself an oddly beautiful Kubrickian creation). And the always welcome Lois Smith scores as the reclusive doctor responsible for the pre-cogs, though her scene degenerates into pointless weirdness.
The story is well-paced and interestingly twisty, but it sacrifices more and more credibility as it goes. "Minority Report" is almost, but not quite, good enough to coast smoothly over its logical potholes. It's smart, but not quite as smart as it pretends. Philosophically, it sets up an extreme position and then argues against it. Sure, locking people up without trial for things they haven't actually done (yet) is a Bad Thing, but the movie inadvertently sabotages its point with a montage of living, breathing victims who would otherwise have been raped, shot, and slaughtered. It's shown in passing, but it sticks with you.
The movie's good, but it's good when it could have been phenomenal, and that's bad.