Intelligent, brilliant, and dark

Rating: 9/10 (30 May 2004)

Tom Cruise's character is perhaps my favorite thing about this thought-provoking Spielberg film. I honestly cannot easily think of a hero who is much more flawed than he is. This is a drug-addict with a short temper, who looks to the new pre-crime unit for hope after his six-year-old son was abducted.
Now, to make a movie about arresting criminals before they have committed the act, the protagonist has to find himself incriminated, right? And so that's exactly what happens. Enter Colin Farrell, just before people really knew who Colin Farrell was. He plays a representative of the Justice Department, overseeing the pre-crime activities to decide if the system is fit to go national. When Cruise goes on the lam, he's the man who goes after him. In one of the movie's better scenes, the two men duke it out inside a Lexus factory. The ageless Max von Sydow plays the veteran police man who has climbed to the top as an entrepreneur in crime, overseeing every facet of pre-crime, and doing everything in his power to keep the system his own. Academy-Award Nominee Samantha Morton is Agatha, the most gifted of the pre-cogs, who has a mysterious past that keeps being echoed in her memory of the murder of a heroin junkie. Peter Stormare makes a colorful cameo as a black-market surgeon, Tim Blake Nelson shows up as the warden of the would-be murderer prison where all inmates captured via Pre-Crime, are put. The fact that Spielberg films the entire movie using white filters to bleach out color helps give the film an atmospheric touch. However, it may not translate so well to the mainstream audiences who don't always appreciate some artistic style.