Shane Gralaw
Second Unit
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2001
- Messages
- 298
Since when does grainy cinematography, desaturated colors, and monochrome clothing equal "futuristic"? Since Spielberg decided to make A.I., I guess, but at least he had a plot to work with there. Minority Report suffers from wooden characters, occasional bursts of tremendously bad acting, HUGE story inconsistencies, uneven pacing, and a generally sloppy vision of the future that strains credibility from the first scene.
In this vision of the future, pre-cogs can forsee murders before they happen, a skill that is less than helpful when the detectives who catch the would-be killers lack the ability to call information and find an address for a suspect even when they have a name to go by or are standing outside a perp's apartment. Tom Cruise stars as the lead investigator who interprets the visions when he should be looking at the silly little marbles with the names of the killers and victims carefully engraved then shellaced upon them (is this extra step necessary when someone's life is in danger?).
Perhaps Cruise's character is onto something here as the marbles are less than reliable. They can pinpoint the name of a perpetrator without error, except when the plot dictates they should be wrong to keep the creaky narrative moving. In Cruise's case, he has been set up by a killer, but when the marble nevertheless shows his name (huh?), he's off and running through a futuristic cityscape of improbable transport vehicles and retinal scans that can pinpoint a person's identity in a flash, but apparently can't tell that something's wrong when one pupil is bigger than the other or your using an eyeball that has been left out of a freezer in a plastic bag for a few hours or even days (but fortunately lacks the ability to decay).
Along the way he meets the goofball from "O Brother Where Art Thou?" (with characterization almost completely intact), a crazy optometrist with an even nuttier nurse (with a massive mole on her lip with humongous hairs sprouting out, to remind the audience that she's little more than a bad Germanic stereotype, I suppose) who act like they're in a madcap farce instead a putatively "serious" sci-fi actioner, a charisma-proof detective played by Colin Ferrel, his cookie cutter cop pals, a pre-cog who can do little but seem beatific and exhausted, and a wacky hologram expert played by an actor who must either be just out of a mail-order acting school or is sleeping with the casting director. The haphazard shifts in tone between these mismatched characters makes me wonder in this is the same director who just a year ago coaxed some brilliant performances from his actors and so deftly handled some complicated story shifts in lasts year's far superior A.I.
Two hours in and several badly edited and thrill-free action sequences later (excepting the pre-cog in the mall sequence that works), Spielberg has twisted the plot into such a senseless mess that it becomes necessary to hang the crimes on a stock bad guy. The director then ties the plot up with a ho-hum ending that makes as little sense as the tiresome exposition that preceeded it. Should I have expected more at that point? I guess not- but as a fan of the director and with the respect I have for many of his actors' previous work, I did.
Overall ** out of *****. Don't believe the hype, save your money and go rent A.I.
In this vision of the future, pre-cogs can forsee murders before they happen, a skill that is less than helpful when the detectives who catch the would-be killers lack the ability to call information and find an address for a suspect even when they have a name to go by or are standing outside a perp's apartment. Tom Cruise stars as the lead investigator who interprets the visions when he should be looking at the silly little marbles with the names of the killers and victims carefully engraved then shellaced upon them (is this extra step necessary when someone's life is in danger?).
Perhaps Cruise's character is onto something here as the marbles are less than reliable. They can pinpoint the name of a perpetrator without error, except when the plot dictates they should be wrong to keep the creaky narrative moving. In Cruise's case, he has been set up by a killer, but when the marble nevertheless shows his name (huh?), he's off and running through a futuristic cityscape of improbable transport vehicles and retinal scans that can pinpoint a person's identity in a flash, but apparently can't tell that something's wrong when one pupil is bigger than the other or your using an eyeball that has been left out of a freezer in a plastic bag for a few hours or even days (but fortunately lacks the ability to decay).
Along the way he meets the goofball from "O Brother Where Art Thou?" (with characterization almost completely intact), a crazy optometrist with an even nuttier nurse (with a massive mole on her lip with humongous hairs sprouting out, to remind the audience that she's little more than a bad Germanic stereotype, I suppose) who act like they're in a madcap farce instead a putatively "serious" sci-fi actioner, a charisma-proof detective played by Colin Ferrel, his cookie cutter cop pals, a pre-cog who can do little but seem beatific and exhausted, and a wacky hologram expert played by an actor who must either be just out of a mail-order acting school or is sleeping with the casting director. The haphazard shifts in tone between these mismatched characters makes me wonder in this is the same director who just a year ago coaxed some brilliant performances from his actors and so deftly handled some complicated story shifts in lasts year's far superior A.I.
Two hours in and several badly edited and thrill-free action sequences later (excepting the pre-cog in the mall sequence that works), Spielberg has twisted the plot into such a senseless mess that it becomes necessary to hang the crimes on a stock bad guy. The director then ties the plot up with a ho-hum ending that makes as little sense as the tiresome exposition that preceeded it. Should I have expected more at that point? I guess not- but as a fan of the director and with the respect I have for many of his actors' previous work, I did.
Overall ** out of *****. Don't believe the hype, save your money and go rent A.I.