The idea of stopping crimes before they happen will occur long before the year 2054. Actually, it is going on now, at least in theory. The ability to make an infallible system where we can predict crimes would come in very handy for our government right now. Minority Report is a pretty good, but not great movie, that suffers from a common malady of many recent American films, that it is at least a half hour too long. Tom Cruise is John Anderton, a top ranked police officer at the Pre-Crime division in Washington D.C. Thanks to the help of pre-cogs, who are three psychics who can see crimes before they happen, there hasn't been a murder in six years. Naturally, one of them "sees" Anderton committing a murder, and the hunter becomes the hunted.

Anderton eventually teams up with one of the pre-cogs, played by Samantha Morton, to find out, well, quite a bit more than he wanted to know. The main actors, especially Morton and Colin Farrell as Witwer, are very good. But after an exciting opening that is both smart and energetic, the movie starts to turn into something more dark and disturbing, seemingly just to prove that Speilberg has a dark side. There are certainly some cool sequences, such as where they escape the cops in the mall, but these events are surrounded by too much time set aside for "explaining" whats going on instead of just showing it. This was especially evident in the last half hour, when the ending turns into a drawn out explanation. Obviously the filmmakers themselves thought the plot was confusing otherwise they wouldn't have spent so much time explaining what had happened. Either that or they didn't have faith in the audience to figure it out themselves.

The first half hour is excellent, with very cool special effects that integrate well with the story, from futuristic computers to ads that are even more annoying than the those that we see today, a bleak future indeed. On that note, the amount of product placement was way past ridiculous, it was borderline offensive. I do recommend this solid but disappointing movie, it is certainly entertaining, and does not insult your intelligence (except at the end). Again, I would certainly have liked it more if it were shorter. Still, it is like two movies in one, part intelligent sci-fi action flick, and part detective thriller. Unfortunately, it is never both at the same time.

Rating: ** 1/2