Summary
John is in the car with Agatha, and she's very cold. He notes that it must be because of the drugs that Precogs take and that it will wear off soon. He asks her to give him the information he needs, such as the identity of Leo Crow, but she simply asks, "Is it now?"
John goes to a Gap to get Agatha some new clothes. After scanning John's new eyes, a screen identifies him as "Mr. Yakamoto," and he looks around the store while Billie Holiday plays.
Back at PreCrime, Danny has deduced that John is not interested in ransoming Agatha, but instead wants some information that's inside her. Looking for clues to where John might go next, Danny pulls apart the computer on John's desk, looking for its programmer. He finds the name of a computer technician, Rufus T. Rowley.
We meet Rufus, who works at a large virtual reality organization. He gives a tour to a man who says he wants to kill his boss, as John enters, holding Agatha close to him. When John tells Rufus that Agatha is a Precog, he doesn't believe him at first, but soon enough he realizes that she is in fact a Precog, and John asks for his help downloading the minority report. "I need you to hack into her," John says, and they set to work trying to see John's future through Agatha's predictive powers.
They record the images from Agatha's mind being projected onto the wall. In Agatha's projection, John will kill Leo Crow, but the premonition cuts off right after he kills him. John grabs Agatha, yelling, "Where's my minority report? Do I even have one?" Agatha looks at him and tells him that he doesn't have a minority report.
Suddenly, Agatha becomes upset, having another premonition. John looks up at the wall where he sees Anne Lively, apparently underwater. John recognizes her and notes that Agatha wants him to see Anne Lively's death. The memory goes backwards, and John tells Rufus to record it all. We see Anne Lively looking at a masked man, but just before he takes off the mask, Agatha tells him that people from the PreCrime department are inside.
John and Agatha make a run for it. As they walk through a mall, Agatha tells John to grab an umbrella, then predicts that a man outside will drop his briefcase, which happens. As they walk, Agatha continues to predict exactly what will happen at every turn. She stops him in the lobby to stand behind a man selling balloons. The PreCrime cops cannot see them behind the balloon and so split up to go look in other places. Agatha and John leave the mall, at which point they're spotted by two PreCrime cops.
Outside, Agatha tells John to give a beggar some money, which he does. The beggar leans over to get the coins, and the cops run through the door, tripping over the beggar. It's raining, and John puts up the umbrella Agatha told him to get, obscuring their identities. As they walk up towards an apartment building, John notices that a billboard is being raised up outside it, with a picture of the man outside the window from Agatha's premonition on it. "That's the man outside the window," John says, looking at his watch. There are 12 minutes until his predicted murder of Leo Crow.
Inside, John looks up Leo Crow's apartment, and Agatha tells him that he should leave. "I can't. I have to know. I have to find out what happened in my life," he replies, assuring Agatha that he will not kill Leo Crow, because he doesn't even know him. John looks over at an older woman sitting in the lobby smoking a pipe and laughing at him, the same one from the premonition.
Agatha and John go to Leo Crow's room and find that the door is open, with 4 minutes until the murder is set to take place. In the apartment, John cannot find Leo, but he does find a pile of photographs of children on Leo Crow's bed. There is a photo of Sean, his missing son, and John realizes that Leo Crow is his son's kidnapper. Staring at the photo of Sean, John says, "I'm not being set up...I don't have an alternate future. I am going to kill this man."
Frantically, Agatha tries to convince John that he has a choice not to kill Leo Crow, just as Crow walks in the door. John grabs Leo and throws him on the bed, accusing him of kidnapping his son 6 years ago in Baltimore. Agatha screams as John throws Leo up against a mirror, breaking it. He interrogates him more, and Leo eventually admits that he told Sean that he was a policeman, that he bought him a pretzel and sang him a song, and that Sean was happy. Leo tells him that he tried to drown Sean by putting him in a barrel, but the barrel floated back to the surface.
John cries then continues beating Leo up, as Agatha stands by weeping. Eventually, John holds up his gun and points it at Leo, just like in the premonition, with 10 seconds to go. "You can choose," Agatha whispers, and the alarm goes off, signaling the time by which John should have shot Leo. Instead of killing him, John arrests Leo, dictating to him his Miranda rights.
"You're not gonna kill me?" Leo asks, confused, adding, "If you don't go through with this, my family gets nothing...You're supposed to kill me. He said you would." Leo reveals that he was hired by someone who called him on his cell phone and told him to pretend to be the man who killed Sean. The man who hired him supplied him with the photographs. John asks him who set it up. Grabbing John's gun and pointing it at himself, Leo tells John that he cannot tell him who hired him, or his family gets nothing. Suddenly, Leo shoots himself with the gun, and falls out the window. John and Agata flee.
Later, Danny and Fletcher investigate the crime scene. Danny is skeptical that a child killer would put all his photographs of children on his bed, revealing that he's never had an "orgy of evidence" like this on a homicide case. "This was all arranged," Danny says.
We see Lamar Burgess at home watching the news about Leo Crow's murder. Burgess' wife hands him the phone; Danny is on the other end, and tells him to meet at John's house, because they're chasing the wrong man.
Danny hands Lamar a gun that they found in Leo Crow's apartment, which Lamar identifies as a gun that he gave John in Baltimore. Danny shows Lamar a video of Arthur and Dashiell's premonition of Anne Lively's murder, and tells him that "Agatha's stream was missing." He then shows Lamar Agatha's premonition of the Anne Lively murder, which was recorded by Rufus. While Lamar thinks the footage is exactly the same, Danny points out that in the different premonitions, the wind is moving the water in opposite directions.
Danny explains that John was watching the footage of the Lively murder right before it was tagged, and wonders why someone would want Agatha's premonition erased from the data file. "I'm thinking someone got away with murder," Danny says, explaining that Jad told him that sometimes Precogs see the same murder more than once, in something called "Precog deja vu." Danny then suggests that what might seem like an echo could actually be a completely different murder.
Danny elaborates: "All you'd have to do is hire someone to kill Anne Lively, someone like a drifter, a neuroin addict, someone with nothing to lose." He explains a scenario in which one killer is arrested before they can commit a murder, but then another killer comes and completes the crime dressed in the same clothes as the projected murderer and carries it out in exactly the same way. Lamar looks at him curiously, as Danny suggests that whoever did it would have to be someone who already had access to the previsions.
Suddenly, Lamar shoots Danny, once in the chest and once in the head, after noting that the Precogs cannot detect what is happening where they are.
John and Agatha drive through the country to Lara's house. Just as they are arriving, Lara calls Lamar asking for help and tells him that John and Agatha are arriving at his house now. "Keep them there, I'm on my way," Lamar says, and Lara requests that he not tell Danny Witwer, as she doesn't trust him.
John introduces Lara to Agatha, and Lara and John go for a walk on the dock. On their walk, John recalls reading Tom Sawyer to Sean, and the fact that Sean got scared in the scene when Tom and Becky got lost in the cave.
Meanwhile, Agatha wanders through the lake house, wandering over to a closet, in which she finds all of Sean's things.
John explains to Lara that someone was using Leo Crow as a red herring, but that he didn't take Sean, when suddenly he realizes that he was set up for Leo Crow's murder immediately after figuring out about the Anne Lively case. He runs up to the house to find Agatha.
Analysis
A huge twist occurs when John finds out that he doesn't even have a minority report—the only that would save him from becoming a murderer. After bringing Agatha to Rufus to download her premonitions and see if things might turn out differently for him, John reviews her premonitions, seeing that she also predicts that he will murder Leo Crow. Throughout the film, John's last-ditch hope was that he would be able to find a minority report for his own case and prove that he is not going to murder Leo Crow, but instead he finds that there is no doubt that that is precisely what he will do.
Once again, the past and the future are conflated in complex and exciting ways, as John gets closer to his predetermined future. When he arrives at the apartment where he's supposed to kill Leo Crow, Agatha goes against the entire premise of her function as a Precog and advises him to walk away, insisting that he has "a choice." While making the choice to avoid the murder he is supposed to complete seems like the obvious choice, John falls in step with his "fate," telling Agatha that he needs to "find out what happened with [his] life." This logic is a seemingly counterintuitive one, in that he is referring to his future actions as the events that "happened" in the past tense. Such is the strange logic of time in Minority Report.
At the philosophical center of the film is the question of free will and choice. Agatha, the bearer of news from the future, tries hard to persuade John not to behave recklessly in spite of knowing that Leo Crow is his son's kidnapper. "You still have a choice," she says, distressed, insisting that because he knows the future, John has a choice to do the right thing and not resort to the violence that has been predicted. In spite of her job description explicitly being about the inevitabilities of time's unfolding, Agatha holds out hope that John can conquer his own violent impulses with free will.
The film is so full of twists and turns in the plot that it is difficult to trust new information. As soon as John thinks he's solved the mystery of who Leo Crow is, and has managed not to kill Leo, in an impressive exercise of free will, he learns that Leo isn't even the kidnapper after all. This twist, the realization that Leo was hired by some other agent to pose as Sean's kidnapper to ensnare John, suggests that there is a much deeper organizational and corporate conspiracy at work than John had even expected. The system is working not only to frame him and lock him up, but also to mislead him entirely, and perhaps to cover up the actual circumstances of Sean's disappearance.
The conspiracy is, terrifying enough, headed by Lamar Burgess, the director of PreCrime. While he has appeared to be a warm, stable paternal figure for John, he reveals himself to be the evil mastermind behind the entire operation. His villainy is all the more horrible given his closeness to Lara and mentorship of John. The revelation that Lamar Burgess is the antagonist of the film is meant to jolt and disturb, as he kills Danny Witwer abruptly, in cold blood.
