MERCURY RISING (1998)
Rating: 2.0 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out ********************************* A Movie Review by David Sunga
Directed by: Harold Becker
Written by: Ryne Douglas Pearson, Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal (from a novel by Ryne Douglas Pearson)
Starring: Bruce Willis, Miko Hughes, Alec Baldwin, Kim Dickens
Ingredients: Autistic kid, disgraced FBI agent looking for redemption
Synopsis: A nine-year-old Chicago autistic boy named Simon (Miko Hughes) accidentally breaks a top secret government code that was placed in a dime store puzzle book. The problem is that Lt. Colonel Kudrow (Alec Baldwin) of the National Security Agency has a lot of money invested in the code. Kudrow reasons that if the kid can crack the code, then he's a security hazard that must be terminated. Soon Kudrow's hired assassin wipes out Simon's hapless parents.
Meanwhile down-in-the-dumps outcast FBI agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is assigned to find Simon. He finds Simon and then, while on the run, must figure out who's trying to murder the boy and why. In the process, he bonds with Simon.
Opinion: The premise of MERCURY RISING sounds promising. After all, what audience can resist feeling for a handicapped kid in trouble, hounded by sinister, big bad government forces? Unfortunately MERCURY RISING suffers from two major movie turnoffs: a passive hero and a contrived plot.
Ideally in a movie you want a hero to be actively searching for clues or nosing around for ways to conquer or circumvent a terrible dilemma. But Art Jeffries - - the FBI hero of this story - - doesn't do this. He gets chased and finds he can't trace the killer. Then he basically hangs out and doesn't know what to do until the end of the movie, when an NSA girl contacts him.
The plot? It leaves you asking questions such as "How did the dead guy with a bullet in his brain manage get up and dial 9-1-1? And why would a beautiful single woman wake up and willingly open her apartment at 2:00 AM to a strange man? And if the nerds knew the bad guy was a killer, why did they just sit there and wait for the killer to kill them?" The actions seem contrived.
On the other hand, the dramatic strategy behind MERCURY RISING is to develop audience sympathy for the autistic kid and the disgraced FBI hero and then give us a happy ending for them. MERCURY RISING does this.
Reviewed by David Sunga April 4, 1998
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