It's 2054 and the Washington, D.C., police department's Pre-Crime unit is six years old and going strong. The experimental program uses a trio of psychic precognitives to predict murders before they happen by connecting an elaborate machine to the precogs' brain waves that presents their visions to the Pre-Crime cops. Armed with advance knowledge and advanced weapons, the Pre-Crime unit heads out to arrest the suspect, before he or she commits the crime. Everything about the system is working perfectly, until one day the chief of Pre-Crime, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), sees himself as a killer in one of the visions. Refusing to believe he would ever commit murder, Anderton finds himself fleeing from his former colleagues as he searches for a way to prove that Pre-Crime and the precogs aren't as infallible as their proponents would like everyone to believe. To discover the truth, he kidnaps (he might say "rescues") the most psychically talented precog, Agatha (Samantha Morton), and takes her along on a wild ride that explores the possibility of a preordained future and the ambiguities of the past--including the unsolved disappearance of Anderton's own 6-year-old son.

As Anderton, Cruise adds another credit to an ever-growing list of films in which he's transformed his handsome face into a nearly unrecognizable mask. Despite the disguises, it's impossible to forget that it's Tom Cruise up there, but he plays the role with such gusto that you really can't fault the performance just because the actor has one of the best-known faces on the big screen. Cruise comes off as intelligent and aware of his character's context in cinematic history, especially in the carefully crafted scenes that pay tribute to some great moments in moviemaking history. Especially noteworthy is the allusion to the behavior-modification scene in A Clockwork Orange: Cruise's eyelids are pulled wide open with metal clamps to allow a doctor to replace those baby blues with eyeballs that won't identify him in a retinal scan. Through this and other scenes, Cruise proves in this film that while he might be a golden goose at the box office, he's not afraid to be an ugly duckling, too. Despite his forays into the grotesque, Cruise is still the guy you root for in the Mission: Impossible-like chase and fight scenes that pepper Minority Report. A little less admirable and a lot less exciting is Max von Sydow as the director of the Pre-Crime program, Lamar Burgess, with a passable albeit dull performance. Morton's Agatha has spent most of her life floating in an isolated water tank so when the kidnapping takes her outside it's not surprising that she overplays the innocent-abroad thing. It must get old living in a tank envisioning murders, but that's no excuse for the overdone performance. Finally, Colin Farrell's understated FBI agent, Danny Witwer, is the perfect foil for Cruise's high-energy Anderton, although Witwer thankfully sheds his mellow demeanor for a raucous fight scene with Cruise inside an auto manufacturing plant.