Minority Report (12)

I've seen the future

What a recovery. After making one of the dullest movies of his career (A.I.) only last year, Steven Spielberg has in Minority Report conjured one of his very best, a gleaming, dynamic package of thrills that pinballs between science fiction, philosophical mystery and urban noir. Such is the unpredictable nature of his genius: who other than Spielberg had the nerve to follow the schlocky horror of Jurassic Park with Schindler's List? As David Thomson commented: "Doing them together is like writing Anna Karenina and Murder on the Orient Express at the same time." In any other film-maker this versatility would be spooky, but for him it's just another day at the office.

Where A.I. was as inert as a mausoleum, this new film is urgently paced and dryly knowing. What's changed? For one thing, Spielberg has delegated screenwriting duties to Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, who expand upon a Philip K Dick short story about a "perfect" crime-prevention system that turns its chief enforcer into an outlaw. For another, it hits the ground running in a way quite different from any other Spielberg film; this thing really shifts, and feels, oddly, like the work of a much younger man. Its opening 20 minutes are about the most exhilarating I've seen this year, and yet it's about a crime that doesn't happen.

The catch is this: the year is 2054, and Washington DC is at the forefront of a brave new policing system known as "Pre-Crime". Heading up the task force is John Anderton (Tom Cruise), supervising a trio of psychics known as "precogs" who, supine in a flotation tank and wired to a computer screen, visualise murders and thus enable the police to prevent them from happening. Orchestrating the precogs' fractured clues on a floating computer screen like a conductor on his podium, Cruise can piece together the crime scene – in this case, a cuckolded husband about to carve up his wife – and arrive just in time to wrestle the knife from the assailant's hand.

Prevention has become a science, the murder rate is down to zero, and all that stands between Pre-Crime going national is an upstart from the Justice Department, Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), who may want to muscle out Cruise.

Foreboding is tucked into the very fabric of this film, in the way that cinematographer Janusz Kaminski contrasts blinding whites against inky blacks, and the metallic sheen of the technology glows chill and implacable. The gathering clouds of conspiracy finally burst once Cruise is himself fingered for murder by Pre-Crime.

It's the same twist as another recent Dick adaptation, Impostor – the hunter hunted – but Spielberg and his production designer Alex McDowell have rubbed some dazzling new sparks off the old rocks of futurology: science friction, if you will. Whereas George Lucas bored us to tears with his aerial stunts in Attack of the Clones, here you're left half-laughing, half-gasping at the ingenuity of cars that run up and down the sides of buildings, police flying squads that actually fly courtesy of jet-packs, mechanical mini-spiders that scuttle through a tenement block identifying the occupants via a retinal scan. A chase through a car production plant seems to end as Cruise falls into the clanking jaws of the machinery, but then emerges encased within a freshly assembled getaway car. You may feel inclined to applaud.

So can our supercop hero escape his pursuers? More interestingly, can he escape his fate? This is the philosophical crux of the movie. The authorities have got the goods on everyone, which looks like bad news for free will: if genetic predisposition is enshrined within the law then some of us are doomed from the start. All Cruise can hope for is a glitch in the system, a possibility that the inventor of Pre-Crime (Lois Smith), a genteel, motherly lady in a gardening smock, will just about admit.

The precogs' soothsaying has never been wrong, she says, but "sometimes they disagree" – and the alternative version is filed in a "minority report". For this information she snatches a rather ungenteel kiss from Cruise, a moment that seems creepy, tender and funny all at once. There's an answering echo to it in a later exchange between the fugitive Cruise and a sleazeball surgeon (Peter Stormare) who has just performed the tricky operation of equipping Cruise with a new pair of eyes. Huh? Why, so that he can evade police identification via the ubiquitous retinal scan, of course. (You get the hang of this stuff eventually). "I want to keep the old ones," says Cruise of his plucked eyeballs. "Why?" Pause. "Because my mother gave them to me." I loved that line.

The plot requires some brainwork to figure out, and its twist is filched from LA Confidential, but no matter: chances are you'll be carried over the odd bump by the barrelling momentum of the chase. And there's enough strangeness to keep you bemused and enthralled for days after, like the sudden spurts of clairvoyance that pour from the most gifted precog, Agatha (Samantha Morton), as she and Cruise are chased through a shopping mall. She stops a woman she's never met to tell her: "He knows – don't go home." It certainly beats Russell Grant as a warning system. You can feel Spielberg enjoying himself as one visual gag tumbles after another, like the umbrella serendipitously opened against a downpour, which also happens to be a perfect cover against rooftop surveillance. Another surprise: Tom Cruise gives a compact, unshowy performance, perhaps chastened by the shrewd, watchful presence of Colin Farrell, the Dublin-born actor who impressed so fiercely in Tigerland last year. In Samantha Morton, pale and frail, Spielberg detects the unsettling abstractedness that Woody Allen found in her calf-eyed mute in Sweet and Lowdown – The Woman who Fell to Earth.

Minority Report is a film with a serious theme – can a system that keeps us safe also keep us free? – yet where Spielberg has previously coated his messages in a glaze of piety, this time he investigates the dark side unencumbered by massed choirs or joyous epiphanies. Serious intent and devilish fun meet head-on, and it's one big blast.