Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise on the set of "Minority Report"

In case you've been floating sedated in a tank of sensory-reducing goo like the Pre-Cog crime-fighting psychics in Minority Report, the movie is a sci-fi thriller set in here-before-you-know-it 2054. Starring Tom "Mission Impossible" Cruise as Detective John Anderton, a top gun, so to speak, in an elite pre-crime unit that specializes in getting their man before the dirty deed is done. They manage to pull off this task through the help of the aforementioned Pre-Cogs, who are able to predict a capital crime before it goes down. A neat trick, but if they could pick Power Ball numbers I'll be really impressed.

"There hasn't been a murder here in six years," brags Det. Anderton about the success of the program in Washington D.C. But then he gets the regrettable news that he is the number-one suspect in a near-future murder of a man he's never met. Anderton's "mission impossible" (and he'd better accept it if he wants to make it to the sequel) is to escape the microwave-hot pursuit by his own police squad. He also must dig deeply into a matrix of subplots including the death of his son, and a possible conspiracy masterminded by Pre-Crime Unit Director Burgess (Max Von Sydow) and maybe even the mechanic who works on Anderton's magnetically levitating Lexus. Hey, what's an action hero without a cool car?

With so much on Anderton's to-do list and an eye-popping arsenal of special effects for Spielberg to show off, no wonder Minority Report takes nearly two-and-a-half hours to complete. And for the first two hours, it's time well spent, before succumbing to the obligatory warm-and-fuzzy ending that its PG-13 rating implies. Cruise clocks in his least cocky performance since Born on the Fourth of July and Spielberg has at last decided to make his audience's pulse pound rather than need the assistance of a life-support system as in last year's A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

And with over 40 novels remaining in Philip K. Dick's bibliography, hopefully a more demented, definitive version of the author's virtual vision, from a director like David Cronenberg, is closer than we know.