Meet Steven Spielberg, hardboiled cynic

Cruise is generally regarded as an affable action hero without depth, an almost robotic exemplar of American maleness. Anderton isn't a protagonist who's likely to engage your passions, but Spielberg has done an admirable job of pulling some deeply damaged weirdness from beneath Cruise's bland persona. Anderton's a good cop when he's at work, but he sits around his sterile hive-like apartment at night inhaling an illegal street stimulant and talking to holograms of his missing son (abducted from a public swimming pool) and the mousy wife (Kathryn Morris) who has drifted off to a Cape Cod-esque retreat rendered in even more washed-out colors than the rest of the film.

When he's on the run, Anderton seems to wander through a pastiche version of film history, from the city of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" through the baroque urban intrigue of "The Big Sleep" and "Chinatown" and the Gothic sci-fi of "Blade Runner." He ventures into the lair of the geneticist who accidentally created the precogs, and this reclusive genius -- who is raising carnivorous flowers in a greenhouse, naturally -- turns out to be a woman with a vaguely predatory manner. It's a nice conflation of various noir clichés (and a terrific cameo for Lois Smith).

In an enjoyable but arguably irrelevant bit of grotesquerie, Anderton undergoes black-market eye surgery (to evade the omnipresent retinal scans) and, like any good noir hero, ends up blindfolded and trapped in a filthy apartment. Also, as the hero of the film, Anderton does not realize until long after we do that Burgess (Max von Sydow), his fatherly superior -- following in the footsteps of hundreds of duplicitous Hollywood judges and police commissioners before him -- is perhaps not worthy of his undying trust. ("That which keeps us safe," von Sydow intones, in an infomercial for the precrime program, "will also keep us free.")

So, yes, much of "Minority Report" plays like a game, but it's a game whose board and pieces have that slimy, slippery feeling that comes from the underside of the id. When Anderton begins to communicate with Agatha (Morton), the primary precog, whose visions don't quite conceal a deadly secret, the film gets a bone-sizzling jolt of electricity. To save himself from committing a foreordained murder, he has to pull Agatha out of her womblike tank into a world that can only terrify and disorient her. (He also has to buy her clothes at the Gap, in one of the movie's more cynically amusing product-placement sequences.)

The connection between Anderton and Agatha, two people who have lost everything important and have only each other, is intensely physical but not exactly sexual; it's needy and strange and sadomasochistic but still innocent. There's a distinction between the swaddling comfort of sentimentality -- in which Spielberg has long specialized -- and the uncontrollable, not-quite-conscious buzz of deeply felt emotion, and this is one of the latter's rare appearances in his work.

Agatha's visions are both fallible and reliable: Anderton indeed finds himself facing a man he's never met before in the predetermined hotel room, and various elements of the movie's mystery -- the fate of Anderton's son, the role of Burgess, the identity of the murdered woman in an allegedly prevented crime that Agatha keeps compulsively replaying -- come into clearer focus. As in all noir films (and this may or may not be a flaw) not all these questions will be answered in the end, and the nature of fate and free will remains as puzzling as ever.

It's too early to know whether "Minority Report," on the heels of "A.I.," marks a brief detour in Spielberg's career or a permanent change of course, but either way it's a dark and dazzling spectacle. Even his attempt to craft a resolution to Anderton and Agatha's stories feels more like an offer of shelter and succor than a happy ending. Adults can survive and adjust, even build anew amid the emotional wreckage of their pasts. But the terrors in the darkness -- the boogeymen who tear children from their parents, the nightmares whose details you can't quite make out -- never go away.

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