If there ever was a movie that suffers for its insatiable desire to please, ladies and gentleman I present to you Minority Report. This is understandable, however, because the collaboration at hand – the one that sells this movie in any market in the universe – is between Spielberg and Cruise, two men who have built careers (“careers” being an understatement) packaging the product humans crave. Of course both have occasionally (and more recently) taken risks. Cruise did Magnolia and a few Cameron Crowe flicks and Spielberg, before making last years A.I., told the media, “I have spent my career making movies that make others happy, now I'm making movies that make me happy”. Well hell Steve! We obviously have better taste. But regardless of Mr. Spielberg's statement, I have to accuse him of lying or at least telling a Hollywood truth.
Perhaps A.I. was some cerebral anti-establishment work of art that will be reevaluated in ten years and then be praised to the heavens (just ask that Dworken guy), but Minority Report is an unabashed attempt at a summer crowd pleaser and there is no shame in that; the shame is in Spielberg being exposed so nakedly as a sentimentalist (although Schindler's List is one of the most raw motion pictures of all time), a man who overindulges at the expense of the story, and a director who may need to study some of his earlier work to reacquaint himself with the purity of filmmaking.
The story is based on a sci-fi bag of tricks from writer Philip K. Dick and it teems with imagination and philosophical imponderables, but perhaps in screenwriters Scott Frank and John Cohen's extraction, they grabbed blindly without enough consideration, or added plot points without consideration. Something was done without considering the
audience, our patience, and intelligence. Like A.I., the great movie that should have made it to the screen is forty five minutes shorter than the rather good movie we get in its place. So we put our money down and in return Spielberg delivers the fireworks early and throughout. The special effects and ingenuitive futuristic sets and gizmos are excellent. 
Tom cruise plays a fine flawed hero glossed to perfection by a director who knows how to treat his cast to their matinee idol advantage. Cruise, a natural talent, eases his way through this role – although it does require some range, he never needs to stretch; he has covered all of these emotions before in various projects. We also get smolderingly good Colin Farrell (Tigerland) who wins rookie of the year after going head to head and holding his own, first with Bruce Willis (Hart's War) and now with Cruise. The heavy artillery on display here is not anything or
anyone that we “see”; Minority Report is essentially an exhausting decathlon for the brain.
Cruise plays Detective John Anderton, the top cop of an elite and experimental Pre-Crime unit, working in Washington D.C. 50 years into the future. What is Pre-Crime? Oh, that's easy enough…After designer drugs become so vile that….women taking these drugs give birth to sick children who have the ability to visualize events that never happened yet… wait…not just events…tragic events like murder..wait… not all murders..forget it, you'll find it cool and it doesn't even matter. The story is inherently impossible and so many bonus twists and turns were thrown in to make the whole thing a jumble not worth completely unscrambling. What does matter is only how many times you offer up this expression: “Ohhhh?cooool” (you say this when you think you get it). Our transcendentalist theme for the day is – Can we justify punishing the criminal before any crime has been committed, even if the crime is supposedly inevitable. This wont exactly be a novel concept for those of us raised on Torah study or, in the alternative, those of us banging our rabbis occasionally over the past twenty years (that was one of those “in context” jokes). For anyone who sat through the yearly “why was Pharaoh punished even before he did anything” discussion, the Pre-Crime contradiction is kind of old hat, but it still tingles the ethical curiosity. As you will learn in drama class, every story needs a beginning, a crisis, a climax, and a conclusion. Spielberg nails the beginning, presents an intriguing crisis (Anderton is “convicted” of a pre-crime and runs from the law in order to discover the truth), but from there?.not so much. 
To our dismay, we are provided with a barrage of unnecessarily overt “quirky” characters in bit parts (Lois Smith's scientist, Tim Blake Nelson's dim bulb prison guard, and Peter Stormare's plastic surgeon who's motives are incomprehensible) and too many way-too-standard-for-this-caliber-of-movie plot contrivances (everyone knows by now to ignore the outstandingly “bad” guy and to watch out for the trusting confidant – especially when that confidant is played by an actor know for roles as villains). Furthermore, we receive heaping tablespoons of bogus and hollow moments of “anxiety” (by far the most irritating is the one with those balloons – yuck!), a performance by a presumably talented actress, Samantha Morton (haled for work in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown), given nothing to do but whimper with freakish absurdity as one of the “precognitive” murder prophets, and plenty of Spielbergian heart (A kidnapped and murdered son spurs Anderton on to inner and outer struggles – will he find peace!?). Whether you are sick of that or not by now is a personal decision, but why settle for manufactured emotion when there are movies out there like In the Bedroom and Moulin Rouge. I guess I'm done venting now. It would have been nice if this was a better piece of work, that's all – a solid summer entertainment with smarts it is, I can't take that away. With a little bit of editing it would have been a four star, two thumbs up, whatever your way of saying “damn good”. One more thing – besides the fact that within the movie there is something called a minority report, I have no clue why it deserved to be the title of this movie. Think about it and get back to me.