A Steven Spielberg vision of the future, via Philip K. Dick, with a legitimate science-fictional idea in it. The idea has to do with an experimental crime-prevention unit in Washington, D.C., in the mid-21st Century -- the Department of Pre-Crime -- whose task is to stop the murders foreseen by a co-ordinated trio of clairvoyants known as Pre-Cogs, soaking round the clock in a communal bath, in a perpetual twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. They can't tell everything. They can't, for reasons brushed aside in a single snippet of dialogue, foretell any crime but homicide. And they cannot tell where the crime will occur, much less whether the Pre-Crime storm troopers will arrive in time to prevent it. They can, though, tell the names of the victim and perpetrator (neatly spelled out on little wooden balls dispatched through a pneumatic tube), and they can tell, to the exact minute, when the crime will occur. It's the detectives' job to view the mental images (stored somehow in those engraved billiard balls) and to figure out the scene of the crime before the literal deadline. The system seems to be fool-proof, until, at any rate, the Pre-Cogs spit out a perpetrator's ball inscribed with the name of the lead detective (Tom Cruise, in the military haircut of the first Mission: Impossible, and briefly, shadowedly, in the shaved head of boot camp: what a trouper!), together with a victim's ball inscribed with a name the detective has never before heard. There must be some mistake. At around the forty-five-minute mark, the concern with issues (destiny, determinism, and the like) gives way to a concern with chases, fights, games of hide-and-seek, cheap plot tricks. (School's out. Playtime begins.) Well before that, even, the concern with issues has already had to jostle for space alongside a concern with various forms of spectacle: eye-assaulting special effects, elaborate set design, gizmos and gewgaws, smoky desaturated monochromed color. That's the price you have to pay in a Spielberg movie -- and the price he has to pay as well. Never can he work on a movie without overworking it. Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Stormare. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.