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Minority Report
Movie Stats & Links

Starring: Tom Cruise, Max Van Sydow, Colin Farrell
MPAA Rated: PG-13
Released By: 20th Century Fox / Dreamworks SKG
Web Site: www.minorityreport.com
Kiddie Movie: It's pretty deep - better for the older ones.
Date Movie: It's got Tom Cruise, she'll just wish you were him.
Gratuitous Sex: There's a little.
Gratuitous Violence: People get killed.
Action: People get chased.
Laughs: A chuckle or two.
Memorable Scene: The spiders scanning eyeballs.
Memorable Quote: Nothing stands out.
Directed By: Steven Spielberg
Produced By: Jan de Bont, Bonnie Curtis, Gerald R. Molen, Walter F. Parkes

Minority Report
A Movie Review

MPAA Rated - PG-13

It's 1:25 Long

A Review by
The Dude on the Right
I know most other reviewers don’t share this thought, but my personal feeling is that Steven Spielberg needs to get out of the future. First "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" and now "Minority Report." It’s not that both movies are horrible, and yes, they are both visually stunning and can be shown in any movie-making class about how films should be made, but there are reasons movies like "Close Encounters of the Lost Kind", the Indiana Jones series, "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," and "1941" stand the test of time for the average moviegoer – it’s that they are great stories, whether fun or serious, and make you not change the channel when they come on TV. You watch them over and over again; you’ll even rent it again because you enjoyed it the first or second time, but I can honestly say I won’t be too excited when "Minority Report" makes its way to video or cable.

Anyway, "Minority Report" gives us life in the not too distant future, where the crime of murder has become all but non-existent in Washington D.C. because of the Pre-Crime unit. Tom Cruise plays Detective Anderton, one of the Pre-Crime dudes, whose job it is to figure out who is going to murder someone before it happens so that the person can be arrested prior to the killing. He does this with the help of an etched ball carved out by the thoughts of three "Pre-Cogs", psychic humans stuck in a pool (alright, they’re a little more complicated than that, but oh well…) who see murders before they happen. The ball thingy projects images onto a screen manipulated by hand movements.

The Pre-Crime unit has done so well in D.C. that there is a move afoot to take it national, so it’s now under the scrutiny of the government, namely Detective Witwer (Colin Farrell).

As it turns out, one day Anderton is trying to dissect one of the balls when it shows him committing the murder of a man he has never met. Knowing he’ll be arrested before he even commits the crime, he takes off running. He’s chased, gets his eyeballs changed, even steals one of the "Pre-Cogs" to help him figure out if he is being framed, and instead of just staying away from the room where he is supposed to kill this man, well, Anderton ends up in the dudes room, and yea, kills him. Eventually Anderton figures out where the flaw is in the Pre-Crime system, and I’m sure the murder rate jacked right back up to where it was before the Pre-Crime people came into existence.

"Minority Report" does have it’s share of cool chase scenes, the mechanical spider scene is really great, and even watching Anderton manipulate the murder screens is fun, but I lost respect for the story when, fine, Anderton needed to run up to a point, and that was up to the point of the murder. You see, along with showing who is doing the killing, the "Pre-Cogs" also tell exactly when the murder is going to occur. All Anderton really needed to do, especially when he began to doubt the infallibility of the Pre-Crime system, was to wait until after the designated time of the murder. Sure, there was a cover-up in place, but it would have been a hell of a lot easier to expose the cover-up showing there is a problem in the Pre-Crime system.

Too many "give me a break" moments and not enough logic in this movie had me just saying "Other than the chase scenes, what else was there." Fine, give me that morality dilemma to make me think, tell me the film is a visual masterpiece, and try to convince me that sometimes movies are supposed to make you go deep in your thoughts to pull out the relevance of a story to society, but in the end the story really needs to be good. I didn’t think it was. It’s 2 ½ stars out of 5 for "Minority Report." Here’s hoping Spielberg gets back to just telling a good story when he does Indiana Jones 4.

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!

 

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