Tom Cruise wasn't bad, for once, but otherwise this film stinks

Rating: 2/10 (24 July 2006)

Spielberg had been on a bit of a roll before this stinker.
Wow, what a meaningless superficial effects-driven piece of crap. This is a plot-driven movie with a pretty stupid and simplistic and illogical plot. Just a bad film. Others have made these same points here. I will focus my review on the acting.
Dakota Fanning, who plays the little girl and who appears in most parts of this movie, is one of the most annoying things on this planet, with her constant screaming. She put in a really poor performance here. Thank God I did not see this in the theater--I would've had to leave to save my eardrums.
The guy who plays the son, Justin Chatwin, appears to also be a pretty bad actor. I will never understand how he got cast as Tom Cruise's son. He looks to be about Cruise's age, largely because he seems taller than Cruise.
Tom Cruise was actually pretty good though, I have to say, especially for him. Normally I find him to be a substandard actor, but he's pretty believable for some reason in this one.
Tim Robbins put on his usual terrible performance though. I do not know why Robbins ever gets any jobs. He's got to be one of the worst Hollywood actors in history. Wherever he appears, try as he might (and he does seem to try hard), you always know you're watching an actor named Tim Robbins try to play a role, and it never works (no not even in Shawshank Redemption, which is the most overrated movie ever--currently ranked #2 all-time here on IMDb which is totally absurd).
Just your normal old really bad sci-fi movie that happened to have cost a lot to make. Spielberg does make bad ones every now and then. This one is certainly not nearly as bad as HOOK. This one is probably not even in the worst thousand big expensive Hollywood movies. But it's still bad.
I love most of Spielberg's movies. I think of him like a home-run hitter, and this was one of his strike-outs.
However, if you are a big Tom Cruise fan for some reason, this is one of his best performances ever. Not enough to make this a decent movie, but he deserves some credit for being the lone bright spot in an otherwise horrid flick.