Minority Report

Insight? Well, it has its moments

Steven Spielberg's new film has one brilliant idea and that idea, it's tempting to say, is about cinema. Minority Report imagines a future America in which murder has been eliminated, thanks to three clairvoyants – or "pre-cogs" – who see killings before they happen. Their visions come in movie form – as a rush of fuzzy, jumping pictures that, in the film's opening moments, flare, shudder and rewind in the eye of pre-cog Agatha (Samantha Morton). This raw footage is then interpreted by the Pre-Crime police, led by Tom Cruise. In a virtuoso sequence, Cruise scans a forthcoming murder for clues – or rather, edits it into shape. This business affords us the most dazzling piece of sci-fi imagery we've seen in ages – kinetic, sleeker and more nervily futuristic than anything Spielberg has given us before. Cruise waves his hands around like a muscular magician, shunting, warping and montaging a flood of pictures that seem to hang in mid-air: imagine a digital editing system like Avid operated by a film-maker with eight arms and a tight deadline. (All hail to Spielberg's editor Michael Kahn, whose movie, in one sense, this really is.) You might think of the pre-cogs as avant-garde film-makers, generating free-form footage that Cruise's character edits into a mainstream movie with beginning, middle and predictable end (predictable because the law always wins). Likewise, this being a Spielberg film, the electric energies of the start are soon re-routed into something more mainstream and recognisable. Even a story this dark and hard-bitten finds room for Spielberg's usual invocations of home, hearth and mother love.

Initially, though, Minority Report promises something far stranger – it is, after all, based on a 1954 story by Philip K Dick, high priest of anxiety-stricken science-fiction, whose work also inspired Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall. The key idea of Dick's story is the paradox of arresting people for crimes they never actually commit; Dick is less interested in the question of authoritarianism than in paradoxical time-twists and arguments about free will and predetermination. In another of his stories, 20th-century sci-fi writers are revealed to be pioneering pre-cogs: you could see Dick's The Minority Report too as a joke about the reliability of predictive storytelling.

What promises to be a warp-speed dystopian mindfuck in the true Dick manner quickly becomes a mix of familiar commodities in Spielberg's hands – breakneck actioner, futuristic FX epic, conspiracy techno-thriller. Cruise's supercop John Anderton, himself identified as a future killer, goes on the run, wondering whether he's been framed or whether he really is fated to kill a man he's never heard of. This is less a whodunit than a why-would-he-do-it: Anderton has found himself written into a crime story scripted by someone, you'll note, called Agatha.

There's a cold, brilliant diamond of a central conceit here, and you can only dream of this narrative being honed by a film-maker focused on paradox and paranoia – Memento director Christopher Nolan, say. Spielberg, however, drowns his great idea under a torrent of thrills, novelties and dazzling distractions – off-colour gags about eyeballs and mouldy sandwiches, flashy Jetsons-style futurology such as motorways that plunge down the sides of skyscrapers, and interminable chase sequences to prove that Cruise is still on his mettle. The Tom Cruise action canon is becoming as distinctively strange as the Schwarzenegger cycle in its prime – like Arnie, Cruise revels in being martyred, humbled, even mutilated or defaced. Here he's shaven, blinded, briefly turned old and lumpy. We're meant to believe in his character as a hermeneutic super-sleuth, a genius at winkling out the concealed meaning of images, but for the most part his Anderton is a pumping muscle of rage and determination, hyper-tension visible even in his angrily throbbing forehead.

A lot of the film is surprisingly familiar, much of it resembling a deliberate de luxe upgrade of Blade Runner. The slum interiors of Spielberg's 2054 Washington look remarkable close to the crumbling apartments in Scott's film, and there are similar ideas too about future advertising – hard-sell video screens everywhere, and ads pitched directly at the passing punter ("John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now"). (Product placement is still product placement, no matter how ironic – the satire somewhat dulled by the knowledge that Bulgari, Gap et al will come out of this one looking ever so shiny and hip). Scott is not the only film-maker referenced here – Spielberg makes ample nods at Kubrick and Tarkovsky (in the final shot), while Janusz Kaminski's grainy, colour-desaturated photography evokes a metallic, sheened refinement of David Fincher's signature murkiness.

Minority Report is less a brilliant film, you might say, than one that uses brilliance mercilessly as a weapon. What it lacks is a strategy or any sense of consistency. Spielberg's geography of urban extremes – ultra-rich suburbs and city precincts against dilapidated, archaic slums – has nothing like the internal logic of Blade Runner's neon-and-rain metropolis. Nor is there any consistency of character. Most of the film is populated by square-jawed, tough-talking action types – Cruise, lantern-jawed FBI smoothie Colin Farrell, nervous patriarch Max Von Sydow – but occasionally we'll get a bizarre horror cartoon to liven things up. Hence Tim Blake Nelson's robotically chirpy jailer, incorrigible scenery-chewer Peter Stormare as a ghoulish eye surgeon, and a scene-stealing Lois Smith as a fierce old scientist with a greenhouse full of writhing, digitally animated plants (purely, it seems, to keep us amused and Industrial Light and Magic busy).

For all its slapdash hyperactivity, however, Minority Report has a quiet core of thought and mystery, and it's visible whenever Samantha Morton's Agatha is on screen. Agatha is the film's female principle, in every sense, and the film takes on a glacial intensity whenever Morton turns up with her haunted eyes, shaven brow and ghostly freezer-pixie appearance. There's a beautifully synchronised scene where Agatha guides Anderton through a mall, predicting perils moments before they happen – as if she'd already seen the movie, in fact. Morton's weird, asexual presence – staring, shivering, muttering, screaming – brings the film a genuine spark of the uncanny.

Morton's presence is a good example of how perfectly the film works when it simply lets its images do the talking. There are some terrible moments when its big ideas are driven into the ground by Cruise's Pre-Crime cohorts earnestly discussing justice, authority and the sacred. But when Spielberg lets the key visual metaphors speak for themselves – and I don't mean the overworked leitmotif of blindness and insight, the endless retina scans and spare eyeballs – then the film becomes truly articulate. Most of Minority Report is throwaway, but the sight of Cruise "conducting" pictures in the air, or of the pre-cogs floating in their blue pool, gawping like movie-buffs hooked on gross-out crime footage – these images are for keeps.

j.romney@independent.co.uk