Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2192 in VHS
• Released on: 2002-10-29
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Format: NTSC
• Running time: 111 minutes

From 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

Chronique amazon.fr
Ne vous embarrassez pas de faire fonctionner vos neurones pour regarder ce thriller délirant, vous n'en aurez jamais besoin. D'un grand conformisme, ce thriller réussit à planter le décor d'une manière assez divertissante, mais prière de ne pas trop réfléchir à la portée de Code Mercury, sous peine de voir toute cette construction s'écrouler sous le poids de sa propre absurdité. L'interprétation fait l'intérêt du film : Bruce Willis, le jeune Miko Hughes et Kim Dickens sont parfaits, tandis qu'Alec Baldwin trouve là le rôle le plus idiot de sa carrière. Code Mercury, petit thriller divertissant, est d'autant plus réjouissant que le spectateur peut prendre plaisir à être plus malin que le film. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Mercury Rising
I truly enjoyed this movie. In my opinion, this is one of Bruce Willis's best films.

IQ Falling
This one could easily serve as Exhibit B in any indictment of knee-jerk Hollywood anti-Americanism. Exhibit A would have to be a better film.

The premise concerns an autistic child who is able to sightread extremely high-order classified ciphers. He's accomplished exactly that with the National Security Agency's latest version, which he's accessed through one of the lamest plot twists imaginable. (They've placed it in a puzzle magazine to beta-test it--no, I'm not making this up.)

So great -- the NSA hires the kid and turns him loose on Chinese, French, and other unfriendly ciphers, right? No they do not. Wake up -- this is Hollywood. They send goons out to kill him, which is where Bruce Willis, playing a conflicted law-enforcement officer of uncertain antecendents, comes to the rescue. From there on it's the standard huggermugger--unnecessary hairbreadth escapes, elite assassins who turn dopey at the most convenient moment, all-but-omniscient villains who can't see the obvious trap at the climax, etc.

The acting was phoned in. Willis can do many things well, but he can't do conflicted. For some peculiar reason, the guy who fed Buscemi into the wood chipper in "Fargo" has his hair dyed black in this one. All traces of quirkiness evident in his performance for the Coens has vanished here.

The sole exception to the overall blandness is provided by the Bloviator himself, Alec Baldwin. Perhaps the film's major offense is the implication that whole scheme is being carried out in support of Iraqi agents working against Saddam. (Kind of getting a jump on Fatboy Moore here.) Baldwin repeats this contention several times during the film, very impressively, too. With conviction, you might say.

All in all, this is a film that makes "Enemy of the State" look good. A clearer recommendation I cannot provide.

A great concept, utterly defanged of any real meaning
There was an article about a script writer's journey in getting his picture made. I sympathize with the guy. He was down on his luck, his rent was three months overdue, and his wife was getting seriously pissed off.

The plot of his script was simple. It was about an autistic boy named Simon who can read the secret codes embedded in crossword puzzles. In other words, he took a common urban myth and wrote a script about it. Not original, but certainly compelling. Add Bruce Willis to the mix and you have a big budget movie.

Then one day, his agent called. He was nervous. A major studio was offering a six figure number for the movie. When other movie studios heard about it, a war of escalation ensued. Soon, they were trying to outbid each other. The price kept climbing and climbing and climbing.

Finally, the agent had enough. The script was sold. Presumably, the scriptwriter got to stay married and pay off his rent. And, I hope, socked the money away into savings. Because this movie sucks.

The movie went through several title changes, a sure sign that there's a problem. It was originally supposed to be Simon Says, but the execs changed it because nobody knew what that meant. So they changed it to Mercury Rising instead. As Dr. Evil would say, "Riiiight."

There's a few problems. One of them is translating onto screen the depiction of code. Apparently, the movie decides code decryption sounds like a high-pitched whining sound. Perhaps it's an accurate parallel, but it's not fun to listen to.

Simon's autism is depicted a little too accurately. His parents are killed early on, so Simon's on his own and fairly incapable of doing much besides wailing his head off when touched. This is very accurate. This does not make for a pleasant movie.

Willis' character is the usual -- haggard, determined, violent. He isn't much more than that. He gets tangled up in the plot (FBI vs. "Government Bad Guys") and calls in favors.

The bad guys show a distinct lack of common sense. It's so blithly nonsensical that it's not even worth the energy to describe the inconsistencies. Suffice it to say, the bad guys show a boogeyman-like ability to pop up anywhere when convenient, and a surprising inability to do it when it might impair the protagonist.

What bugged me most is that ultimately, this movie could have been about ANYBODY who happened to know Something Secret (TM). It wasn't about the boy's ability to crack code, it was about Bruce Willis' character protecting an innocent. Like in Eraser. Like in Enemy of the State. Like in a dozen other movies. Only in Enemy of the State, the main character's skills actually were USEFUL in the plot. Simon never gets to exercise his code-cracking abilities more than once (to meet one of the soon-to-be-dead informants).

Even in portraying an autistic person, Rain Man and Cube still managed to make the character worth liking instead of utterly pathetic.

The other problem is that the villain's execuse is -- *GASP! -- being a patriot to protect undercover agents in Iraq. Well, that dates the movie just a little bit. Not their fault, necessarily, but certainly the movie loses its sting. In addition, the whole concept of "sacrificing one for the good of all" is a little more strict these days. Ask an American if an autistic boy's life should be spared to save thousands of agents attempting to stop terrorism and more than half will doom the boy.

I can understand why the studio execs bid on the idea. It was a great concept but utterly defanged of any real meaning, failing to utilize its characters, its high-minded ideals, or even its action scenes in a way that makes us care about anybody in the movie. Yes, even an autistic little boy.