Well the AICN Sun blistered MERCURY RISING. Sun didn't have a grand time there, but he did file this report on the film. It does contain spoilers so beware, and enjoy...
Sun here with a review of the thudding new Bruce Willis/Alec Baldwin action flick Mercury Rising. Here's the premise: an autistic boy cracks a code in the back of a puzzle magazine that was planted there by two geeks working for a major NSA code project, Mercury. The solution to this puzzle is a phone number to one of the NSA offices, and as soon as the boy calls it, evil head honcho Alec Baldwin puts a hit out on him. Why? Good question! Apparently they're afraid an autistic boy can now bring down the entire code project...even though he's not aware of the code, it's never going to be used around him, no one but the agency knows he possesses the ability to break it, etc. In other words, check your intelligence at the door.
Meanwhile, Willis plays an FBI guy distraught over the death of a boy during a botched FBI raid on a bank robbery. He has an unitentionally hilarious confrontation with his boss, who you know is evil because HE only sits behind a desk all day while the Bruce is actually doing something, dammit! Bruce gets demoted, which he should have seen coming because the boss uttered that immortal pre-demotion movie saying, "You're out of line, Jeffries!"
Anyway, Willis ends up crossing paths with the autistic boy and protects him after he starts to suspect people want to kill him. Of course, I've seen Aliens, I understand that Willis is trying to help this boy because of the boy he just couldn't save earlier...but the movie, assuming we must be autistic as well, constantly flashbacks to the scene of Bank Robbery Boy getting shot to drive that point home. By the second time this scene was played in slow-mo flashback, the audience burst out laughing. Not necessarily the reaction they were going for. Of course it didn't help that the boy was ugly and looked like he was doing Elaine's flailing dance from Seinfeld instead of getting shot.
The only performance that stands out is that of the boy playing the autistic, but other than serving as a plot device he has zero to do. Bruce is Bruce, while Alec has about 10 minutes of screen time and is only given idiotic things to do. There's also a pseudo-love interest introduced halfway through, but the character is horribly vapid. She's supposed to be a stranger whose care of the autistic boy inspires Willis. Yet in her first ten minutes taking care of him, he walks into traffic and she complains she didn't know she had to watch him every second, and then later in the movie after Bruce Willis leaves for an hour or so, she chooses that time to go take a shower, and leaves the kid completely alone, apparently ignoring his constant penchant for wandering off. And we're supposed to be impressed by her caring manner?
I could list a million other implausabilities but I feel I've wasted too much time already. The problems with this movie were all in the story and script (from the writers of such gems as Superman 4 and the Beverly Hillbillies). It's unfortunate that they didn't take the time to create a more believable story and a more-than-one-note relationship between Willis and the kid. Why they went ahead with this mess is a mystery even the autistic kid couldn't crack.
