MINORITY REPORTDirected by Steven Spielberg A 20th Century Fox release Opens Friday at area theaters

What price security? Minority Report has the good fortune to come along at a time when the question’s never been more relevant. Set in the year 2054, the film is close in time and even closer in concept. Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s short story by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, the story proceeds linearly from a devilishly simple premise: What if the government had the ability to stop crimes before they happened?

In a mere six years, the world of Minority Report has been transformed by the introduction of the Department of Pre-Crime, whose officers use data obtained from a triune oracle composed of three amphibious-looking creatures called Pre-Cogs to pinpoint the date and time of murders before they happen, and then intervene to prevent them from occurring. The Pre-Cogs are human, but only barely; they're kept submerged in a pool of "protein milk," forbidden human contact, their heads shaved, clad in near-transparent webbed suits that make them look as much machinery as man.

Minority Report cleverly tests our resistance to Pre-Crime prevention right off the bat, by sending the department's officers off to intervene in a particularly gruesome double homicide. We see the pre-perpetrator, a mild-mannered suburban husband (Arye Gross) engaging in desultory conversation with his wife, and we think: They must have it wrong. As John Anderton (Tom Cruise) struggles to sort through the imagistic data provided by the Pre-Cogs to nail down the crime's location, the camera keeps cutting back to this utterly mundane breakfast scene. It's only as Anderton and his fellow officers rush to make it in time that the crime of passion begins to take shape. The husband returns for his glasses, catches his wife in flagrante, and raises a pair of scissors to commit the crime we've already seen, when bam! Down come the officers, crashing through the skylight on suspended cables. (The shades of Brazil are doubtlessly intentional.) He's restrained, arrested for "future murder," and carted off. Pre-Crime wins again.

Needless to say, this scenario raises troubling questions, not least of which are the fact that these people are being arrested for crimes they've never committed -- in fact, never will commit. The system works, no doubt: An opening commercial brags of the reduced murder rate in the District of Columbia, the only place where the system's yet been implemented, although they're bucking to go national. But absolute faith is required. Even in this quasi-fascist future world, where a citizen's every move is tracked by a network of retinal scanners, it's not enough to lock someone up just because you think they might commit a crime. (We'll leave that to the attorney general.) The Pre-Cogs' visions are unassailable, implacable, and always, always right. (One thread the movie mentions but doesn't pursue is the idea that a cult has grown up around them.)

Or at least, so everyone seems to believe, especially the haunted Anderton, whose son was abducted just months before Pre-Crime was launched. He needs to believe that future crimes can be stopped, that the cycle of pain can end with him, no matter how many pairs of unbloodied hands must be shackled, how many bodies suspended in floor-to-ceiling stasis. But when the Pre-Cogs finger him, predicting that in 36 hours he'll murder a man he's never met, Anderton has to believe what everyone else believes -- that he has a choice. As he quips to his fellow cops before embarking on a lengthy chase, "Everybody runs."

That line, part Sisyphean resolve, part trailer-bait whammy, says a lot about Minority Report's split personality. At times, the film plays like what, by the numbers, it is: the product of a handful of intensely commercial personalities doing their best to make an uncommercial movie. Cruise has never been more somber, less raffishly charismatic. (With Vanilla Sky, this makes two movies in a row to work the mutilation of that famous face into the plot.) His Anderton never cracks a smile, never lets go of the past. And though Minority Report doesn't have the airless deliberateness of Steven Spielberg's A.I., its bleached, desaturated palette and its compelling vision of a dystopian future are hardly the stuff of your average popcorn flick. (One frightening piece of augury: animated advertisements that scan your identity and call out to you by name.) The effect is a movie that moves in fits and starts. Minority Report is short on whimsy -- though there's a neat bit where an errant jet pack ignites a grill-full of hamburgers -- and long on ambience, which misfires almost as often as it succeeds. (Tim Blake Nelson's organ-playing prison guard and Peter Stormare's menacing back-alley surgeon seem to have wandered in from another movie, perhaps one by the Coen brothers.) And the movie's ending, which has distracting similarities to the climax of The Fugitive, flubs most of the questions it's posed. But they're good questions, even in a week when the word "preemptive" isn't figuring heavily in our nation's foreign policy.

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