Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40169 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-09-22
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 111 minutes

Amazon.com
Take off your thinking caps and toss 'em in a corner, 'cuz you won't need 'em when you're watching this deliriously dumb thriller from 1997. Bruce Willis stars as a demoted FBI agent who comes to the aid of an autistic boy whose mind holds a potentially deadly secret. It seems that by gazing on a puzzle magazine and making order out of a hidden system of numbers, the 9-year-old autistic boy (Miko Hughes) has accidentally deciphered a sophisticated top-secret government code. This makes him the prime target of the ruthless bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin, in one of his silliest roles), and Willis comes to the rescue. This formulaic thriller sets up this plot with a lot of entertaining urgency, but you can't give any thought to Mercury Rising or the whole movie collapses under the weight of its own illogic and nonsense. The redeeming values are the performances of Willis, young Hughes, and newcomer Kim Dickens as a woman who agrees (perhaps too easily, it seems) to aid Willis in his plot to outmaneuver the bad guys. Mercury Rising is not a waste of time compared to other formulaic thrillers, but its entertainment value depends on how much you enjoy being smarter than the movie. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

A very Good and Emotionally Charged Action Film
This is an action film with a lot of emotion behind it. It has a real heart felt story that questions plausibility and true credibility at times but it really hits home as it evokes genuine sentiment and feeling through a brutal world we now live in. This to date is the last great action film staring Bruce Willis. His performance of the dedicated civil servant doing what is right against all odds is admirable. His adversary Alec Baldwin stands for all that is wrong with a system that is supposed to protect our way of life and liberties while sacrificing the innocent trying to protect it at the enrichment of his own ego. At the center is a small autistic boy who supposedly can compromise Baldwin's plans who is being protected by FBI agent Willis who has fallen from grace. In simplest terms it is a film of right and goodness against greed and evil. On that level this film works. This film contains one of John Barry's last great scores as it gives credence to the story by bringing our most tearfully compassionate emotions to the surface while driving the narrative with an impassioned purpose. I like this film a lot I think because it takes the hardened tough good guy hero image and on an emotional level shows what drives him and what's really makes his heart tick.

Mercury Rising--What an ironic title for an autism movie!
As the mother of an autistic child, I was intrigued by this movie when I found it while channel surfing. I choose not to comment on the believability or likeability of the plot, but will say instead that the actor who played Simon, the young autistic boy, did an OUTSTANDING job. The writers, apparently, also did some research on the condition. The use of the cards Simon kept pinned to his belt was right on the money. Autistic children comprehend so much better visually, and through the printed word, than they do through listening to people speak. The scene where Simon is spinning wheels on a toy car is also very realistic. My only other comment is on the irony that, in 1998, before anybody figured out or suggested that mercury causes autism (this is a theory first posed in 1999 and gaining more and more credibility every day),the producers had the foresight to name their movie about an autistic boy "Mercury Rising."

Mercury Rising (1998)
Director: Harold Becker
Cast: Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Miko Hughes, Chi McBride, Kim Dickens, Robert Stanton, Bodhi Elfman, Carrie Preston, Lindsey Ginter, Peter Stormare, Kevin Conway, John Carroll Lynch.
Running Time: 108 minutes
Rated R for violence and language.

"Mercury Rising" begins as an innovative, interesting look at govermental intelligence and the difficulties of autism, but unfortunately becomes a psuedo-"Die Hard" meets "Enemy of the State" and flops under a deflted script, mediocre acting, and lifeless direction. FBI agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is washed out after confronting his superiors after an undercover job goes bad, while Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) is an autistic child who loves puzzles. When he cracks a code that the Government put into a magazine to test it's strength he becomes a target and his parents are murdered by someone from the NSA. Jeffries is assigned to the case when the boy goes missing and easily finds him; however, Jeffries soon realizes that this is not a simple case and that both he and the boy are in great danger as NSA Colonel Kudrow (Alec Bladwin) tries to protect his code.

Despite having a career boost in the mid-1990's with the solid "12 Monkeys" in which he showed a nice range of depth, Bruce Willis proves that he an still do pretty lame and mindless films by signing on to do this. Willis looks like he is on autopilot - and Willis on autopilot is not a good thing. He mumbles his way through it and doesn't really convince aside from when being an action hero. Hughes is really good if a little annoying, but his abilities as a young actor are obviously evident in his efforts. Baldwin's performance is reminiscent of his role in "Glengary Glen Ross" here, talking with authority and down to his staff, but he is nowhere near as good. Ginter is menacing but not given enough time, Dickens is simply thrown into the film without thought and Peter Stormare makes a fleeting appearance. In fairness it isn't that the film is really bad, it's more that it is condescending to it's audience. The actual plot is interesting; "Enemy of The State" was good using the same sort of `all powerful Government conspiracy'; however, this film feels so lazy in every approach that it spoils a potentially good foundation by not playing to its strengths and thus exposing its weaknesses.