IHAO on ... Minority Report - READER REQUEST

Requested by my wife, Melanie Jessel

In the film Minority Report, Tom Cruise is framed for a murder … kinda … that he did commit … kinda … and then he solves a mystery about an old murder that was never solved because the precogs didn't see it ... kinda.  It is not good.  Roll credits.

Tom Cruise is not happy with that decision.  Do the review.

Fine, fine.  I don’t like just coming out in the beginning and telling you my thoughts, but there’s no way around it.  Minority Report is dumb.  It is filled with ridiculous imagery and stupid choices on every filmmaking axis all over the damned thing.  I have nowhere near enough time to point out all the little stupid things, like the “NO TRESPASSERS” sign that is placed so that the camera can see it but no one else at all could ever see it.  Or the ridiculous waterfall roads, because those make sense.  Or the tracking shot over the apartment building with the spiders where nothing makes sense and you don't see our hero do anything and time is just wasted.  Or the heavy-handed eye motif that every character says stupid symbolic pithy things about eyes and seeing and blah blah blah.

This movie does do one thing pretty okay: Tom Cruise’s emotion overall is pretty fine, and not too jarring.  Really, all the actors are pretty fine.  Cruise does a decently fine job through the film being an emotional anchor as he is running around, getting bitten by mutant plants, waving his hands around the most ridiculous and inaccurate computer ever made, surviving being inside of a car as it is being put together in a factory, and having fist fights on top of girders that are being slung through the air.  Man, this movie is dumb.

This gif is amazing.  In the movie, this is Cruise chasing ... ugh, chasing his original eyes that are rolling down this sloped hallway.  Yeah.

The movie is color corrected all to crap (a huge pet peeve of mine), and it suffers from Spielberg-itis really badly with spotlights in every window.  I was shocked aliens didn't show up somewhere, though arguably the mutant plants could cover that role.  The problems with the movie are not in the general plot itself, as that is taken from a Phillip K. Dick story, as are most good sci-fi films not-coincidentally.  No, it is in Spielberg’s additional design choices thrown on top of this world.  Not only that, but I don’t know what happened to Spielberg’s sense of adventure and action since the Indiana Jones films, but the action in this movie is slow, dumb, and really poorly done. 

I put this movie in the same category as Rise of the Planetof the Apes: incredibly stupid, filled with incredibly stupid choices, but fun enough to watch, a lot like a really slow train wreck.  Minority Report does have basically overall better acting, but nothing special to write home about.  Watch the movie with friends and enjoy yourself, but high art this is not.

Grade: D