Witness Mercury Rising, the latest exercise in kick-ass politics featuring Bruce Willis. In scene one, rabid FBI agents storm a small-town bank in South Dakota and slaughter the backwoods militia types inside, including two teenage boys. The rest of the picture is a violent high-tech fantasy about the misdeeds of the National Security Agency, which will stop at nothing--not even the murder of its own computer nerds or a nine-year-old boy--to protect a $2 billion military supercode called "Mercury."
And Bruce? As usual, he's the lone, heroic Dirty Harry of the piece, a growling, sweating FBI renegade named Art Jeffries, betrayed by his evil bosses and now pursued by NSA hitmen through the streets and subway trains of Chicago. His partner in righ-teousness is the nine-year-old, Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes), who has inadvertently cracked the spooks' precious security code while fooling around with a puzzle magazine (don't ask how) and has become, against all logic, the prime target for their next fusillade.
Did I mention that the boy is, yes, an autistic savant? Or that the NSA kills his working-class parents in cold blood? Or that Bruce must now play surrogate father as well as armed guardian?
Thus does Die Hard meet Rain Man in a ludicrous collision. In another recent trash movie, noble policeman Andy Garcia schemed to get a bone-marrow transplant for his dying son from a psychopathic serial killer, and that should have qualified as the most far-fetched plot line of the year. Alas, it finishes second. In Mercury Rising, the slick, ambitious NSA chieftain played by Alec Baldwin marshals all the forces at his command to murder a little boy in pajamas who doesn't know an espionage operation from a game of tic-tac-toe. The feds should give the kid a medal and a scholarship to M.I.T. for his gifts. Instead, they want to blow his head off. Talk about merchandising irrational fear: If we can believe screenwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (working from a potboiler by Ryne Douglas Peardon) and director Harold Becker (Sea of Love), government assassins will soon be visiting your local elementary school, hunting down third-graders who've gotten a little too good at their Game Boys.
At the outside, we might take these proceedings as black comedy or misdirected farce, were it not for the deadly seriousness of the thing. It careens from one murder to the next with breathless abandon, leaps from car chase to helicopter crash without ever stopping to think. As always in Willisville, there are some eye-popping special effects and thrilling action bits. The writers also provide our heroes with a couple of friends--a sympathetic fellow agent (Chi McBride) and a good Samaritan (Kim Dickens). But for the most part, it's man and boy against the world, and the world is still one huge, bloody knot of badly imagined conspiracy, turned out like an overgrown Big Mac by the fry cooks of Hollywood.
--Gallo
Mercury Rising.
Screenplay by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, from the novel Simple Simon, by Ryne Douglas Peardon. Directed by Harold Becker. With Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Miko Hughes and Kim Dickens.
