| Review by Mike Clark, USA TODAY When Hollywood's first teaming of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg
delivers the goods and then some, it almost seems unfair to have
fate intervene on its behalf as well. Minority Report, set in 2054,
benefits from chance timing: It's as topical as movies get. Like
Blade Runner, the futuristic sci-fi mystery is based on a Philip
K. Dick story and smoothly blends the emotional and coolly technological.
It deals with the prediction of criminal acts and the arrest of
pre-felons, often seconds before the crime is committed. During
a six-year tryout in Washington, D.C., the system, however frenzied,
has never failed, and everyone seems pleased. Those people include
civil libertarians (now a rare species) and even the Department
of Pre-Crime's perpetually unhappy unit chief (Cruise), who's still
distraught over the unsolved abduction of his son six years earlier. |