Minority Report
Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell,
Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
Director : Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Gremlins, Artificial Intelligence: A.I.; Tom Cruise: Mission: Impossible, Vanilla Sky; writer Philip K Dick: Blade Runner, Total Recall. If you were assembling a science fiction dream-team you couldn't do much better than this. And that's without mentioning Max Von Sydow (Flash Gordon, Dune, The Exorcist . . . the list goes on).
    So have the dream-team pulled it off? Pretty much, yeah . . .

The year is 2054, and the crime of murder has virtually been eliminated thanks to three genetically altered pre-cogs, whose precognitive abilities allow the murders to be stopped before they happen. The system is considered flawless, until the leader of the Precrime team, Cruise's John Anderton, is tagged for the premeditated murder of someone he's never even met.
    Anderton sets off to clear his name pursued by the rest of his Precrime unit and a Detective investigating the division played by Colin Farrell.

As the movie progresses, there a recognisable echoes of the participants former works - especially Blade Runner and A.I. - in both the extravagant sets and the manner in which it's been filmed.
    The effort has been put in: There are cool gadgets, weapons and vehicles that are far from the usual current models with bits of plastic stuck on. There's a whodunnit plot with so many twists and turns towards the end that I defy you to work out more than a fraction of it in advance. There's also quality acting going on here: all the participants make this future totally believable.

Any criticisms? Well, the occasional comedy elements don't sit well with what is essentially a hard science fiction film. The jet-pack chase scene in particular is unnecessarily slapstick.
    Still, if you've already seen Spider-Man, right now Minority Report is the next best thing - and remember: Everybody runs.

:: Rowan Shaeffer