Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg team up in the middle of a great run of movies for both of them here. The Sci-fi meets Film Noir is perfect for Speilberg, and for Cruise this is another in a long line of interesting, and largely against type characters that he had been portraying for close to a decade at this point. The stage was set... but then Colin Farrell showed up in his first large American movie and stole the show from everyone.
