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It must have something to do with the title. First, they gave us Deep Rising, and now they force Mercury Rising on the unsuspecting public. Mercury boasts a bigger and better cast, but is still just as ridiculous. And I'm not even sure that ridiculous is strong enough of a word.
Is it just me or is Bruce Willis just playing the same role over and over again? Don't get me wrong, I like Bruce. I mean, he was in three of the best films in the past few years (Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys and The Fifth Element), but is still mostly typecast as the downtrodden recently fired/demoted law enforcement type guy. In Mercury Rising, he is Art Jeffries, an undercover FBI agent busted down to an office grunt after taking the fall for a Ruby Ridge-type militia standoff.
One of his assignments is to look for a missing kid named Simon (Miko Hughes, Spawn), who has somehow cracked the government super-code using his amazing and seemingly limitless powers of autism. Now, call me crazy, but how often is this kid going to run across scrambled government code involving top secret military plans. It's not like they're putting this stuff on the back of Cheerios boxes. But, rather than ignoring the problem, the powers that be (represented by Alec Baldwin, The Shadow) decide that it would be a better world if Simon would just die.
And what's the deal with Alec Baldwin's career? When was the last time he was in a profitable or well reviewed film? I can't remember either. He is arguably the least talented of all the Baldwin Boys (and is approaching Daniel for the largest), but yet somehow remains on the `A'-list of Hollywood leading men. Of course, I might be saying all of this because I'm jealous of the fact that he probably "loved" Kim Bay-Sing-Er with her own Academy Award. `Just relax, Kim. This is an Oscar tradition. No, I'm not making it up'.
You can probably figure out the rest of the moronic story (from the writers of For Love or Money) on your own. There's lots of gunplay and fighting and punching and yelling. There's the token girl thrown in for no reason (Kim Dickens, Zero Effect). The only characters that I even came close to liking were the two geeky computer experts that work for Baldwin. But, even they couldn't hold my attention, which was busy thinking of the most poetic way to kill each character. I also wondered if the film would be any better if they had cast the wives of the male leads instead.
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