Main cast: Tom Cruise (Detective John Anderton), Max von Sydow (Director Lamar Burgess), Colin Farrell (Detective Ed Witwer), Samantha Morton (Agatha), Neal McDonough (Gordon “Fletch” Fletcher), Steve Harris (Jad), Patrick Kilpatrick (Knott), Jessica Capshaw (Evanna), Lois Smith (Dr Iris Hineman), Kathryn Morris (Lara Anderton), Peter Stormare (Dr Solomon P Eddie), Jason Antoon (Rufus T Riley), Mike Binder (Leo Crow), Jessica Harper (Ann Lively), Tim Blake Nelson (Gideon), and Daniel London (Norbert “Wally” Wallace)
Director: Steven Spielberg

I don’t know which is worse: watching a badly-made movie like Minority Report or watching the pack of movie reviewers in the American media in an orgy of Spielbergian anal-tongue fenestration. Each reviewer is trying to shove his tongue deeper past Steven Spielberg’s and Tom Cruise’s collective sphincters, using onanistic words like “masterpiece” and “Kubrickian” like frenzied Bacchanalian worshipers clamoring for the first drops of the Cruise/Spielberg ego-coupling.

Anyway, the story. It’s 2025, and there’s a new business in town: pre-crime. In pre-crime biz, three psychics, wearing badly-designed catsuits and lying in a sad-looking fish tank, will predict murders and other crimes that will happen in the future. Pre-crime officers will then stop the crime from happening. In six years in this town where Tooth Cruise, sorry, John Anderton lives in, there is no murder thanks to the dedication of the Tooth. Incidentally, the Tooth’s large overbite makes him look like a Cro-Magnon who has only evolved halfway.

Tooth has lost his son and he is now so sad. Awww. He works hard as a pre-crime dude because he doesn’t want people losing their kids anymore.

Then comes Colin Farrell, sexy, dark, and gorgeous, playing an ex-seminary dude who ends up in the law arena of Washington DC en route a stint in homicide, and I curse Mr Spielberg for not making this movie about Mr Farrell’s character. I get the boring stereotypical Instant Robocop instead.

But when Tooth begins finding secrets that the Pre-Crime Bosses don’t want him to learn, he is framed for murder. Now at the receiving of the “Suspicion and guilty, no trial, no jury” whip he wields so effectively in the past, he runs! He has to capture the most powerful of the fishing tank reject psychic – Agatha – so that she can provide an alternative vision – the “minority report” – that will prove that he is no murderer-to-be. It’s a race against time. I need a long bathroom break.

Yawn. What do you call a story where the loopholes are so wide I can see the other side of the universe through them, yet the “plot twist” is one I can predict the second the story kicks in? Mr Spielberg’s attempt to resolve loose threads is special: “This house is filled with so much love.” That’s me you hear throwing up everything I’ve eaten prior to this movie.

Yes, the set-up is ingenious and thought-provoking. But the execution is ridiculous. Only a moron will believe that an entire system that revolves around only three mentally unstable weirdos in jumpsuits will work. What happens when one of them dies? A vital murder in this movie takes place, but apparently the psychics are asleep at that moment. Loose ends? Illogical moments? Mr Spielberg wants you to repeat after him: “This house is filled with so much love.” Love, people, love. Screw the rest, looooove. It’s to Samantha Morton’s credit that she can mouth this line with a straight face.

Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton steal the show, no, they hijack the show from the Tooth’s bland and try-too-hard school of methodical acting. This show should have ended after John Anderton shot that guy in the hotel room – period. I don’t need Mr Spielberg telling me that the house is filled with the residues of his disgusting self-love in the tedious, tiresome, predictable, and outright illogical final 45 minutes.

You know what? I don’t even need Mr Spielberg, come to think of it. This is the latest story he has ruined in his “I won an Oscar for Schindler’s List, so now I make movies just to preach to you about My Message About Humanity!” crusade. The trouble is, his message about humanity is as deep as his brain puddle, his direction takes the turn for a self-indulgent worst, and frankly, Minority Report is a gruesome mutant offspring of the violent, grotesque mating of two of Hollywood’s most overrated egos.

The rolling eyeballs are cute though.