Mercury Rising


1.5/4

Starring: Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Miko Hughes, Chi McBride

Rated R for Violence and Language

When the film came out in 1998, I was desperate to see this movie (don’t ask me why).  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have bothered.  Even at the tender age of 10, I would still have thought this movie to be unreasonably dumb.

When I say that “Mercury Rising” is dumb, I mean it’s REALLY dumb.  Not the kind of dumb that is only obvious if you’re a MENSA member, but the kind of dumb where it’s at times laugh-aloud hilarious.  For instance, there’s a scene where a little autistic kid is freaking out in an ambulance, and it takes what has to be at least an hour before the main character realizes that he can’t question the kid about the murder of his parents.

Even the premise is absurd.  It goes like this: The NSA has just spent two billion dollars on a supercode that is unbreakable.  So in order to test it against the uber-geeks, they put it back of a puzzle magazine (!).  Still with me?  Of course, someone does crack it, but that person turns out to be Simon (Hughes), the said autistic kid.  After an assassin (L.L. Ginter) brutally murders his parents in cold blood, a disgraced FBI agent named Art Jeffries (Willis) saves him, and they go on the run.

There are times, particularly in the beginning when this movie is so dumb that it’s hysterical.  For instance, after the said killer murders dear Simon’s Mommy and Daddy, he goes upstairs looking for his real target.  Good so far, but his search for the kid is anything but thorough.  He upends the bed to be sure, but that’s about it.  Then he stands around as if he’s waiting for his cue to exit.  Then of course there’s Alec Baldwin, who must know that he’s in a horrible movie since he goes WAY far over-the-top.

What the hell were they thinking when they okayed this script?  Or even this premise?  You’ll never get me to believe that there’s anyone dumb enough to take any of this seriously (certainly not in the target audience for this sometimes very violent film).  There may be a sucker born every minute, but not even P.T. Barnum would have shown his audiences something this stupid.

Bruce Willis is clearly walking his way to a big paycheck.  There’s no other reason why he would appear in such an atrocity.  Hell, I’d do just about anything for the salary he probably got for this movie.  Alec Baldwin gives the most over-the-top performance of his career.  Chi McBride is solid in the “reluctant best friend” role, and Kim Dickens is infinitely less annoying than she was in “Hollow Man.”


As funny as some of the initial proceedings are (apart from the opening scene, which despite everything, is kind of powerful), the humor of being “so dumb it’s funny” goes away pretty quickly, and after that means boredom.  There’s not even a lot of the trademark action that populated Bruce Willis movies at the time.  It’s a wannabe Hitchcock thriller that fails spectacularly.

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