Minority Report – directed by Steven Spielberg. SciFi Action Adventure. A police chief gets caught up in the net he has set to catch murderers. 124 minutes Color 2002.
★★★★
Once again Spielberg fouls up the ending of a movie. Of all his films I have seen none have honest endings. Lincoln and Amistad have weak but workable endings, but all the other endings I have seen throw us into the boiling pot of hackwork. Is he sucking up to public sentiment? This is especially distressing since all that I have ever seen has been, up until then, work of strength, imagination, scenic power, and high craft.
In this case we have triple surprise endings to do the damage.
Now the difficulty with even one surprise ending is that we the audience feel betrayed and made fools of by it. Our trust in the narrative and the commitment we have invested in it are tossed out the window for a screwy twist. While the difficulty of any move is, having set the predicament, to find a way out of it, surprise endings pull the rug out from under, not just us, but the characters before us. Spielberg is a professional person; why doesn’t he know this?
Tom Cruise gives his all to this, over 2-hour, material, and his all amounts to a good deal. For no actor presently before us enjoys acting more, throws his will, and his energy so thoroughly into it as he. His complete investment is why we keep watching him, and he never disappoints.
The story concerns three zombie bodies who can foresee future crimes. And, as the principal talent among them, Samantha Morton is super. You thoroughly believe her half-drowned soul. The excellent Colin Farrell presents Cruise with a rivalry — a rivalry of cute guys, for one thing — but a rivalry set to prove Cruise’s crime prevention methods are flawed. Whatever is the reverse of effervescence would define Max von Sydow — gravitas incarnate; if he were any more grave he’d be in the grave. He is wonderful as the senior operative. But particularly brilliant and richly funny is — worth the entire price of admission — Lois Smith as the inventor of the crime prevention zombies. Her scene with Cruise is priceless. How did Spielberg’s people know to hire her?
The present film is fortified by Spielberg’s old reliables John Williams’ score, and it is filmed as usual by Janusz Kaminski so brilliantly, so beautifully, so imaginatively, that you feel the whole movie is taking place inside a cube of ice. The spectacular action sequences and special effects alone are worth watching the film for, for they are rare and strange and fun.
What a marvelous movie to collapse in on its own excessive final complications.