MERCURY RISING A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1998 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
The opening, very deliberate minutes of "Mercury Rising," Bruce Willis' latest retread, sets up the oft-seen hostage situation in which a bunch of raggedy bank robbers negotiate with police. For a moment I was reminded of that film-within-a-film finale of Robert Altman's brilliant "The Player," in which a pumped-up Willis caricatures himself, busting in at the last possible minute and rescuing a frail Julia Roberts with an apologetic "traffic was a bitch."
But in Harold Becker's action thriller, undercover FBI agent Art Jeffries (Willis) is already inside the bank and doing a little negotiating of his own. Jeffries thinks he can end this standoff without bloodshed, but the impatient cops move too soon and Jeffries is left, quite literally, with blood on his hands.
Bummer.
Said to have lost his magic touch, Jeffries is assigned to "sit on a wire" from hereon out. But shortly after one of the film's secondary characters repeats the transit metaphor--"traffic was like mud; I oozed home"--a couple of shots are fired and a nine-year old boy is suddenly left parentless. Enter Jeffries stage left.
Which reminded me of something else I remember from "The Player."
Of the thousands of scripts a major studio reviews each and every year, only about a dozen are so are produced. One wonders, therefore, why the executives at Universal chose to greenlight this particular project. "Mercury Rising" is certainly no worse than any half dozen Bruce Willis shoot-em-ups. It's just not any better.
The film's "hook" is that the kid in danger here is autistic. The filmmakers go to great lengths--and I mean *great* lengths--to show us what that means, exactly. Simon (convincingly portrayed by Miko Hughes) stares off into space, presses doorbells very deliberately, repeats things by rote, and acts afraid in the presence of strangers (unless they happen to be *cute* strangers, like the one played by Kim Dickens, for example).
Simon also enjoys puzzles, and this proves to be his undoing, as he inadvertently deciphers a matrix of seemingly random characters in a "geek's puzzle magazine," placed there by two National Security Agency compududes to see if anyone human out there could crack a two billion dollar chunk of code known as "Mercury."
My favorite scene in the film comes when one of these nerds tells Jeffries that he'll leave him an e-mail message in an account called "einstein." Jeffries has a savvy librarian do a Web search for "FBI" and "einstein," instantly locating the address, and logging in. "Try Arthur" Art suggests for the password, but that's not it. "How about E=MC2?" and, as an afterthought, "all caps." He's in!
Why worry about some juvenile savant puzzledoer posing a threat to national security when you've got Bruce Willis: SuperGuesser to contend with?
One of the interchangeable Baldwin brothers plays Lt. Colonel Nicholas Kudrow, creator of the NSA code, who wants Simon erased (er, why exactly?). You know he's a bad guy because he talks in a very loud whisper. Kudrow and Jeffries eventually duke it out atop a skyscraper that looks a little too like the Nakatomi building in "Die Hard," with the autistic kid wandering around on the ledge to increase the tension.
Willis is no Olivier but he's always fun to watch. Unfortunately, the rest of "Mercury Rising," even with its autism bent, is simply stock footage.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews