No redeeming qualities

Rating: 1/10 (26 November 2005)

I normally see some good in any movie, but really... I honestly can't find any with this. I couldn't even watch it all, which is again rare for me as I'll normally suffer through a film just so I've seen it.
Cruise and Spielberg's previous collaboration, Minority Report, was a brilliant piece of work for both of them. Why they came together to do this piece of tripe is beyond me.
Where do I start? The main thrust of this story is that some people want to get from point A to point B. To me, that's not good drama. The world is being destroyed, and getting to Boston is the overriding theme. The theme of survival is secondary to this, and that' just ridiculous.
Everything is so by the numbers. Cruise plays the typical American hero in this film: an ordinary guy, trying to be a good father, who becomes a hero. People (like news reporters) don't mind stopping and filling him in because he is The Hero. So clichéd.
There is never a sense of real emotional depth or a feeling of impending destruction. I mean, the world is being destroyed and we have time to spend talking about peanut better sandwiches and toilet breaks. It doesn't add realism, it detracts from it.
Attempts at humor are blatant, and could only have been more blatant if they put up a note instruction people to laugh. The moment where the son asks if the machines have come from Europe just gave me this vision of the writers sitting there, tittering, marvelling as their own comic genius as they wrote the line.
There were vague moments where the film seemed to try and capture a little 9/11, the fallback idea of the lazy writer these days. Dakota Fanning having to ask if it's terrorists attacking, and people turning on each other to get a car, seemed liked desperate attempts to add some grit. It fails.
I also have to make special mention a moment when Cruise's character and his two kids are speeding along a road, dodging between cars. I don't know what was worst here: the fact that they don't wear seat belts while hurtling along at god knows what speed, that Cruise's acting is just plain bizarre, or the cringe-worthy moment of the brother calming down the sister like she's a neurotic adult. It's a shame when a small kid is being bred into problems of adulthood, needing "space" or whatever other barmy self-help book stuff they were embodying her character with.
All in all, worthless. Really. The effects were appallingly blatant CGI, the acting was poor, the writing was poor. No artistic or unique merit. I think they only positive thing I can say on a final note is that the DTS soundtrack was quite good at times. But that's not enough of a reason to watch this stinker.
Get Minority Report instead for a better Cruise/Spielberg collaboration, and if you want humans in danger then I think that even Deep Impact does a lot better job.