Hey, Philip K. Dick! Remember Craptacular Movie Tie-In ‘Minority Report?’ It’s STILL All Your Fault!

Oh yes it is. Sure, you brought the world Blade Runner, Martian hookers with three boobs and other such wonderment, but up with this shit we shall not put!

As we know, Minority Report the movie was rather agreeable. Mad midget Tom Cruise flailed about with some manner of high-tech glove (the kind of contraption you'd only find in one of Japan's seizure-inducing fluorescent electronics stores), there was chasing, explosion-ing and sticks that would bash your face in the face and cause you to vomit simultaneously. If that weren't enough -which it plainly was- Colin Farrell took a bullet to the fleshy-bits. Don't tell us he didn't deserve that fate after camply flouncing about in that blond hairpiece in Alexander like a big girl. (Was revered general of the ancient world, Alexander the Great, ever to be seen in bars with names like Dudes! Dudes! Dudes!, picking up men in his gonad-enhancing tight leather pants? He was not, but Farrell endeavored to leave us with that impression anyway).

Even with such really quite good source material as this, any movie that's thrust through the video game-ifier is going to emerge from the other end a huge, festering heap of terrible from the depths of the Devil's foreskin. Step forward, Minority Report: Everybody Runs.

This woeful 2002 ballache from Treyarch purports to be loosely based on the hit film. Just how loosely are we talking? It must be pretty damn precarious. Loose enough to goddamn drop right off and roll under the dresser where no bastard can find it, presumably. Which is, we can surely all agree, on the loose side of things. (As one player certainly did not say, "this is just like the movie! I totally remember that scene where John Anderton cruised through a shit-stained sewer on that jetpack! Hell yeah!") What we have here is a semi-competent beat ‘em up, albeit one with the most preposterously exaggerated ragdoll physics and weaponry that the decrepit consoles of a decade ago ever saw.

Whether you're in the PreCrime building, an apartment block, a shopping mall or any other locale the game's forty levels see fit to send you, your objective is to punch faces in the face. You can do so by utilizing an array of farcical hand-to-hand combos or a selection of demented non-lethal gravity guns. The latter of which is, begrudgingly, amusing. The environment is replete with breakable objects, which your opponents can be thrown -literally or otherwise propelled- into, over or straight through. Obstacle and unfortunate body alike will be realistically affected by the impact, allowing us all manner of sadistic license.

When a mob of angry youths assault you in the mall (with a derisive chorus of "my grandma could take a punch better than you!" No, really), heaving them over the railings on the third floor and watching them crumple bizarrely at the bottom is far more entertaining than it should be. There's no gore of any kind, and opponents do not ‘die,' in deference to the whole concept of Minority Report. In lieu of that, unconscious guys will fly about the place like the time Homer Simpson pursued his errant potato chips aboard the rocket. It's... hilariously, irresistibly farcical throughout.

Sure, the developers couldn't quite cobble together the $3.50 necessary to procure Tom Cruise's likeness (also, he was otherwise occupied weirding everybody out by jumping on a chatshow couch like a hyperactive infant that day), but this silver-haired old bastard will suffice. See this peculiar, slow-mo-centric floaty combat below, and try telling us that the Benny Hill theme wouldn't be appropriate accompaniment:

Source of screenshots: deafgamers