As the police chief Cruise is essentially playing his “Mission: Impossible” character with more depth and pathos. Colin Farrell has the more interesting role; Cruise’s character may be flawed, but he’s still an action hero. Farrell has more room to breathe and move around because of the moral leeway his role allows. A former candidate for the priesthood who became a homicide detective, he is brilliant but arrogant, and seems as much amused by his own contradictory nature as he is by his pursuit of Cruise. Cruise is driven, direct, instinctive, and sincere. I regret that “Minority Report” does not exploit the differences between these two men as well as, say, “The Fugitive” does with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. They do have a neat metaphysical argument in which a ball rolling off a table is used to symbolize the inevitability of the psychic’s premonitions. Farrell, who functions with two-steps detachment from the world, says premonitions and gravity aren’t the same thing. Cruise, hawk-nosed and ready for action, says they are.
Like many other critics I’m inclined to agree that “Minority Report” might well be one of the best films to come out of 2002, but it’s not perfect. So much care has gone into the rules of pre-crime, our sympathy for the characters, and the futuristic visuals, that apparently some old-fashioned predictable plot points are overlooked. As spoilers I will not mention them again until the end of my review, along with an accompanying warning. But I will say “Minority Report” had more “I-saw-that-comings” than a truly great movie should.
“Minority Report” also gets a minor strike against it for Kathryn Morris as Cruise’s wife. What’s wrong isn’t her performance, but how she’s written as a two-dimensional, forgettable movie wife/mother. “A.I.” had Frances O’Connor in a similar role. I can’t even remember what she looked like in “A.I.,” and I know it’s not O’Connor’s fault because she was hilarious in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” My final, albeit minor complaint is one of tone. Spielberg, who worked with legendary wacko director Stanley Kubrick on “A.I.,” in both movies tries to adopt some of Kubrick’s trademark weirdness. Sometimes Spielberg gets the words but not the music; the late Kubrick always had some goal in mind for his more creepy sequences, but at times Spielberg seems to play odd for the sake of oddness. Fortunately “Minority Report’s” stranger sequences are more hit than miss, scoring big with how Cruise enlists a surgeon (Peter Stormare, with snot dripping) to help get him back inside Pre-Crime Headquarters.
Like “A.I.,” “Minority Report” is based on a short story, this time by Phillip K. Dick instead of Brian Aldiss. I enjoyed “A.I.” and admired its visuals, characterizations, and performances, but found the movie uncertain of its own ideas. With “Minority Report” Spielberg and his screenwriters have assembled their thoughts on free-will verses predetermination more clearly. “Minority Report” is filled with many threads and ideas, but none are smothered, and none are sacrificed for the sake of thrills. Spielberg, that most emotional of directors, gives us the eyes of our protagonists as much as the dangers they face, and he draws us in exactly as we know he would.
P.S. Among “Minority Report’s” screenwriters are Scott Frank, who wrote Kenneth Branagh’s first-rate reincarnation thriller “Dead Again,” as well as the screenplays for “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight,” and “Little Man Tate.” In “Minority Report,” as with his other pieces, he shows an ability to integrate noir mysteries with diverse elements like science-fiction, the supernatural, or character-driven humor. He is also, according to the Internet Movie Database, “Minority Report’s” uncredited second-unit director.
P.P.S. (SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ON UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN “MINORITY REPORT!”) As promised, the clichés that “Minority Report” should have left out.
1) “The boss” did it. Max von Sydow as the villain. From Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945) to Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential,” (1997) the hero’s boss and mentor, to whom he confides, turns out to be the one who betrayed him.
2) The “slip-up.” After Cruise is imprisoned there is a scene between the villainous von Sydow and Cruise’s wife. The instant that scene began I knew its sole purpose was for von Sydow to make a verbal mistake and reveal himself as the evil mastermind.
3) The “red herring.” Cruise’s initial cries that Colin Farrell framed him are so obviously wrongheaded—if for no other reason than because revealing the true villain that early on would be dramatically clumsy—that I did not even mention them in my review.
4) “Telling the mentor and then getting shot.” Farrell goes to the mentor with new evidence and half-accuses him of murder. “Have you told this to anyone?” von Sydow asks, and when Farrell says “no” von Sydow drops a cap in him. The scene is done well (not as well as “L.A. Confidential) but we’ve seen it before. A more inventive twist would have been for Farrell, now three-fourths of the way into the movie, to solve the mystery instead of Cruise, or at least see the error of his ways and help Cruise out. But this would violate a tradition older than mere Hollywood by millennia, which is that the hero must do everything.
Finished July 6, 2002
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night