Mercury Rising A movie by Harold Becker Mit Bruce Willis, Miko Hughes, Alec Baldwin, Peter Stormare u.a.
9 year old autistic Simon (Miko Hughes) loves to solve all kinds of riddles. But who would suppose that his hobby can put him into mortal danger. One day, however, his caretaker gives him a riddle magazine that has one very special riddle - the solution of which is a top secret telephone number.
The American secret service has developed a new encryption code for correspondence with their foreign contacts. The code is supposedly unbreakable for computers, not to mention for the human brain. The programmers came up with the ultimate test for the code: they hid an encoded phone number in one of the riddles in a magazine. When the phone actually rings and a kid is on the other end a torrent of events is kicked loose that they can no longer control.
Lt. Nicholas Kudrow (Alec Baldwin) immediately gives the order to silence the kid and his parents once and for all. But Simon manages to escape the killers. FBI agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is put in charge of the case, and a frantic run for the boy's life begins.
Even if this time only one little boy's life is at stake and not the fate of the Earth as in THE FIFTH ELEMENT or ARMAGEDDON Bruce Willis is more convincing in his unusual part as involuntary nanny. The scenes with him and little Simon - very well portrayed by Miko Hughes - raise this movie slightly above the average. Art Jeffreys differs from John McClane of DIE HARD fame not only in that he doesn't sport a bloodstained undershirt, he also is not so excessivly tough and resorts to pills to calm his strained nerves. The man of steel seems to have some dents, or what else is to be made of that? He survives a fall out of a flying helicopter, though. So don't you worry, he's still invulnerable.
Jeffrey's adversary Kudrow is a very different type. Alec Baldwin is a good choice for the part. He's the kind of guy who never gets his own hands dirty and always has his men for the ugly jobs. Not a very likable guy. You can't help wishing for him to end up a grease spot. Considering that kids are never seriously harmed in Hollywood flicks and Bruce Willis always comes out on top you know full well who is going to be alive when the end credits are start rolling. Minor characters serve only to add some blood and noise to the action scenes. As far as suspense is concerned MERCURY RISING is no better than other movies of the kind.
The one riddle of the movie is Peter Stormare's short appearance, but you won't need a Cray computer to solve it. I can offer the following explanations: 1. It was a lifelong dream of his to fight on camera with Bruce Willis. 2. He had some very urgent bills to pay. 3. After everybody saw him in Spielberg's THE LOST WORLD he no longer believes that doing an action movie is bad for his image. His talent was completely wasted on MERCURY RISING, but the more famous names on the poster the more people will want to see the movie.
Miko Hughes turns in a great performance as the autistic boy. Apart from Bruce Willis, who simply does what he always does, Hughes is the real star of the movie and makes the viewers stick out till the very predictable ending.
No surprising plot twists or brilliant ideas, but easier to digest than ARMAGEDDON, where the Last Judgement turned out to be just a harmless shower of meteorites with a pompous prelude.
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