Minority Report (2015)

The futuristic visual effects are mildly entertaining, but the story line becomes tedious and morally defanged by the end of the pilot.

I don't know if [Philip K.] Dick would recognize this story, or if fans of the 2002 Tom Cruise movie will flock to this Cruise-less sequel, which isn't terrible, just ordinary.

[Minority Report] is on the whole competent, watchable and frequently fun--if entirely predictable.

At its heart, beneath all the high-tech whiz-bang CGI, Minority Report is a procedural crime drama with serialized character relationship stories threaded through it.

Neither the actors nor the script do much to breathe new life into a recycled idea.

What’s initially arresting about the concept remains unfulfilled after the pilot, and while it’s understandable that the producers needed to first establish its central characters, Dash and Vega aren’t particularly well-drawn thus far, creating a concern that this show will be more interesting theoretically than it is dramatically.

Unlike the show’s trio of siblings, the audience isn’t psychic, so everyone’s explaining what’s on their minds at all times. It’s an easy mistake that a lot of speculative fiction makes, erring too far in the direction of bringing everyone up to speed.

Peppered in are some humor, like funny references to the past when Lara’s mom saying she met her husband on Tinder, or when Dash uses his abilities for more than seeing crime, like knowing when bird poop is dropping. However, you wish that the show would have been less zippy, less procedural. It hints at dire aftereffects of Precrime, but doesn’t go much beyond that.

Minority Report's reverence for the material that inspired it undermines its own attempts to explore and build on the environments and sensibilities it labors so intensely to recreate.

The pilot of Minority Report, which will have its premiere on Monday on Fox, jettisons everything disturbing and thought-provoking about the film to turn it into a humdrum, slickly bland crime procedural.

The end result is ... merely OK.

Minority Report is a straightforward cop show, with a familiar dynamic between the eccentric genius and the by-the-book detective. It’s gone from counterculture literature to generic network TV.

Cut through the window dressing, though, and it’s just another way of putting fresh paint on a procedural.

A watered-down and considerably less meaningful iteration of the 2002 Steven Spielberg science-fiction movie

As it stands now, the case-of-the-week approach is as hackneyed a take on Minority Report as FOX could have come up with.

Minority Report is networky to the extreme. Bland heroics, banter with all the snap of wilted celery, characters that are the sum of three adjectives and are so effortfully congenial you can practically see the studio exec’s red ink on their foreheads reading “More likable,” and, of course, that odd pro-authoritarian bent that most cop procedurals (except maybe Person of Interest) end up adopting.

The CGI is still pretty cool, and some chuckles are wrought from the futuristic premise (Iggy Azalea is considered a classic in 2065), but at its heart Minority Report is a by-the-book cop procedural with turgid writing and complete absence of subtlety.

The dialogue is leaden and cliched--"You forget," Agatha warns her brother: "The only future you cannot see is your own!"--and some of the whiz-bang technology from the film looks less impressive now that other movies and TV shows have had 13 years to copy it into present-day.

The show itself, while existing in a sleek future of advanced technology, is a bit clunky. It hews to the most obvious tropes of case-of-the-week shows about oddball visionaries partnered with law-and-order sharpshooters, and in the first hour at least, doesn’t pay its audience much respect when it comes to the plausibility of dialogue, character motivations, or the security procedures at a mental institution for former future-convicts.

Minority Report disappoints because, in its first episode at least, it is uninterested in the very idea that enlivened the film: that precrime could be wrong.

Besides Sands's performance as Dash, a likably frazzled ingenue who hurls himself bravely into action but has no physical skills to speak of, the production design is the best (maybe only) reason to watch Minority Report.