For reasons that I can't explain, this has been on my "Must See" list for ages. I really don't know why - Bruce Willis action movies aren't exactly rare beasts and at some point, I figured that this had a plot that offered something a little different. Sadly, it turns out that it really wasn't worth the wait. It lacks the bluster of your usual Willis blockbuster and the story that I had high hopes for quickly finds itself becoming a gimmick.
Willis plays FBI agent Art Jeffries, an undercover specialist who finds himself demoted to monitoring radio transmissions after a botched hostage assignment. However, he quickly finds himself assigned to look for a missing child - Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) who is an autistic nine-year orphaned after his parents are murdered. But Art quickly finds threat there is more to it than that - Simon had accidentally cracked a top secret code after it inexplicably appeared in the pages of a puzzle magazine and was being sought by NSA operatives led by the gravel-voiced Nick Kudrow (Alec Baldwin) and his murderous colleague Peter Burrell (Lindsey Ginter).
Being an odd hybrid of espionage thriller and fugitive actioner, "Mercury Rising" successfully manages to be neither. The action is satisfying enough when it turns arrive in fits and starts but there is an awful lot of dialogue to get through in-between. Willis can pretty much sleepwalk through these kinda movies and sure enough, he simply doesn't engage you enough to care. He's also completely shown up by his young co-star as Hughes is brilliantly and genuinely heart-wrenching as the tortured savant. However, the worst actor by far is Baldwin who seems to be eerily foreshadowing his portrayal in "Team America: World Police". At times, he's simply appalling as he mumbles his way through his lines as though paying tribute to Michael Madsen. Maybe it was he who distracted me from the story which seemed confusing and never really explained what was happening. For example, imagine you are an experienced FBI agent looking after an infant suspect. Would you happily hand the care of the child over to a complete stranger in a café (played here by Kim Dickins) while you popped off to meet an informant because I'm not sure I would.
"Mercury Rising" is annoyingly wasteful of its promising set-up, failing to deliver either a decent action movie or a gripping chase flick. It seems curiously restrained, as though it can't be bothered to be the nail-biting gripper it seems to aspire to. Maybe I'm being harsh on it given how long I've waited to watch it but for me, "Mercury Rising" is just as generic and forgettable as any other Nineties action flick. Shame, shame, shame.
Willis plays FBI agent Art Jeffries, an undercover specialist who finds himself demoted to monitoring radio transmissions after a botched hostage assignment. However, he quickly finds himself assigned to look for a missing child - Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) who is an autistic nine-year orphaned after his parents are murdered. But Art quickly finds threat there is more to it than that - Simon had accidentally cracked a top secret code after it inexplicably appeared in the pages of a puzzle magazine and was being sought by NSA operatives led by the gravel-voiced Nick Kudrow (Alec Baldwin) and his murderous colleague Peter Burrell (Lindsey Ginter).
Being an odd hybrid of espionage thriller and fugitive actioner, "Mercury Rising" successfully manages to be neither. The action is satisfying enough when it turns arrive in fits and starts but there is an awful lot of dialogue to get through in-between. Willis can pretty much sleepwalk through these kinda movies and sure enough, he simply doesn't engage you enough to care. He's also completely shown up by his young co-star as Hughes is brilliantly and genuinely heart-wrenching as the tortured savant. However, the worst actor by far is Baldwin who seems to be eerily foreshadowing his portrayal in "Team America: World Police". At times, he's simply appalling as he mumbles his way through his lines as though paying tribute to Michael Madsen. Maybe it was he who distracted me from the story which seemed confusing and never really explained what was happening. For example, imagine you are an experienced FBI agent looking after an infant suspect. Would you happily hand the care of the child over to a complete stranger in a café (played here by Kim Dickins) while you popped off to meet an informant because I'm not sure I would.
"Mercury Rising" is annoyingly wasteful of its promising set-up, failing to deliver either a decent action movie or a gripping chase flick. It seems curiously restrained, as though it can't be bothered to be the nail-biting gripper it seems to aspire to. Maybe I'm being harsh on it given how long I've waited to watch it but for me, "Mercury Rising" is just as generic and forgettable as any other Nineties action flick. Shame, shame, shame.