Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsLife in post-pre-crime America ... yawn
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2015
Hollywood continues to cannibalize its past with yet another film-to-TV adaptation that should be awarded a prize for marginality. The slick sci-fi thriller Minority Report is an unimaginative riff on Steven Spielberg's 2002 big-screen hit..
Minority Report, which boasts Spielberg as a co-exec producer, is the second series this season to be adapted from a short story by sci-fi maestro Philip K. Dick. (The other Dick adaptation, Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle is a whole, far more welcome, kettle of fish.)
Fox's adaptation, featuring Meagan Good ( Deception) as a headstrong, risk-taking cop and Stark Sands ( Generation Kill, NYC 22) as a psychic crime solver, is on the whole competent, watchable and frequently fun - if entirely predictable.
The pilot opens with a tired two-minute introduction that feels like one of those "previously on" montages.
A series of images accompanied by Good's voice-over, walks us through the plot of the 2002 movie: Once upon a time in the year 2050, Washington, D.C., city leaders set up a pre-crime division that enabled police to arrest people before they committed a crime. These crimes were committed by three young psychics, or "pre-cognitives," who could see murders that are about to be committed.
Four years later, the program was killed after an official was caught manipulating the precogs for his own benefit. The three psychics were installed on an island far, far away and told to live their lives.
Now, it's 2065 and one of the precogs named Dash (Sands), returns to the city as a self-styled vigilante out to stop murderers and other evildoers. Trouble is, without the other two precogs, he never gets to the victims in time. That is until he meets Detective Lara Vega (Good).
Good is terrific as the courageous cop who acts first and thinks later. She and Sands play nicely off each other. Wilmer Valderrama is all but wasted as Vega's boss, while Laura Regan pops up briefly as Dash's caring fellow precog Agatha (played by Samantha Morton in the film).
Each succeeding episode has the crime fighters handle more cases in the manner of every procedural we've already seen 100 times. All in all, the show does little to add to the story's mythology
Dick adaptations, such a Blade Runner, used their futuristic premise to say something about the state of affairs in the world of politics, the economy or human rights. Minority Report features cute future gadgets like a flying cell phone that allows users to take great selfies from above, it has very little in the way of pertinent social commentary.
There's very little here of any consequence.
