Cruising Spielberg

by MATTHEW HAYS

Minority Report must constitute the summer’s biggest big-screen cliffhanger. Scratch that—it must be the year’s biggest. But the cliffhanger isn’t so much whether or not Tom Cruise’s latest protagonist will endure, but rather, will this movie suck?

It’s sci-fi, after all, and director Steven Spielberg’s last film, the pseudo-Kubrickian epic A.I., had the Kubrick Fan Club’s collective nose upturned while leaving the Spielberg Club downright bored. Though I appreciated A.I.’s first 40-odd minutes, so much about the film felt forced and out of whack. It was as though Spielberg was trying to morph himself, like one of his special effects creations, into something he wasn’t. And beyond the Spielberg question, Minority Report teams two of Hollywood’s biggest breadwinners with a concept from legendary sci-fi-lit icon Philip K. Dick (whose stories also inspired both Bladerunner and Total Recall).

Homicidal images

The good news is, Spielberg appears to have been cured of his need to aspire to become another director. He’s back where he belongs best, in storytelling mode. The premise is as silly as it is simple: in the near future, cops in Washington, D.C. have managed to virtually do away with the crime of murder. They have genetically developed three people who lie around in a hot tub while wired to computers that monitor their visions. The three see into the future, where they can conjure up future crimes before they happen. This elite cop team, of which Cruise is a crucial part, must examine the fleeting images of the crimes on the screen and try desperately to figure out where they are going to occur, so they can arrive at the crime scene and arrest the murderer-to-be. Also in the future, everything is in soft focus.

At times, Minority Report feels a bit like Soylent Green on a budget. The art direction is to die for. The normally tiresome CGI overload doesn’t feel overdone here; the car chases and flying-cop chases are fantastically fun, though the film is often too dark, I would suspect, for pre-teen audiences. There are even shades of John Waters about; both vomit and snot are played to the max at key moments. This film also gets good grades for casting; Max von Sydow appears as an aging top cop (any movie that features von Sydow gets serious bonus points).

Snatching Sinéad

As sci-fi cop movies would dictate, Cruise soon finds himself questioning this brave new world. Predictably enough, a murder-free Utopia soon starts to look mighty dystopic. His suspicions about the validity of Operation Precrime’s predictions coming to a head, he’s soon framed for a crime he isn’t going to commit. On the lam from the law, this allows Spielberg to go nuts with the chase sequences, in some of the most satisfying action scenes—ones that are both stunt-ridden and occasionally comic—that I’ve seen in years.

Cruise then kidnaps one of the medically-modified psychic mutants, played by Samantha Morton (of Sweet and Lowdown fame), who suffers a terrible withdrawal while out of the ooze that sustains her in her hot tub. Hair cut to less than an inch long, she looks like a jonesing Sinéad O’Connor. Cruise carries her about town as she tries to help him figure out the mystery of who framed him, who kidnapped his son years earlier and who’s running the cop conspiracy.

For all its futuristic gadgetry and high-minded conceptedness, Minority Report soon becomes, in essence, a basic whodunit movie. Which, frankly, is precisely the kind of thing Spielberg does extremely well. Report is good dark fun, the kind of eye and brain candy that makes for superior summer viewing. This is a Spielberg film, however, and the man just can’t help himself—leave it to him to find a silver lining in the dystopia he so carefully sets up. The uplifting final moments of the film rather undermine some of the previous pessimism about our potential future in a police state, but the filmmaker doesn’t pile on the sap as horrendously as he did in, say, Schindler’s List. Report’s narrative wrap-up is too cheery for my tastes, and feels a bit out of place, but there’s no diabetic coma awaiting you by film’s end. (There are also far too many gratuitous product placements here, ones that make FedEx’s costarring role in Cast Away seem tame by comparison.)
For any faults it may have, though, this is still a well-above-average two-and-a-half-hours of action-movie viewing. Minority Report is something, I suspect, with serious majority appeal. :

Minority Report opens Friday, June 2