Mercury Rising 1998, Rated R

Buy it from

Starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin.

BRUCE WILLIS' AGENT: Hello, Bruce, I've got a script I want you to--

BRUCE WILLIS: Is it an action film?

BW's AGENT: Uh, I'm not--

BRUCE WILLIS: Okay, I'll do it.

There can be absolutely no way that Willis picks which movies to star in based on their screenplays, for if that were the case, Mercury Rising would never have been made... by anyone... ever. Maybe I'm being a little too harsh; I'm sure this script may have been developed into something for Charlie Sheen after Hollywood ran out of '50's and '60's TV shows like Leave it to Beaver and McHale's Navy to turn into motion pictures.

Willis stars as a--hold onto your seats--tough as nails FBI agent who doesn't go by the book. After punching a superior, Willis has been demoted to the FBI equivalent of writing old ladies tickets for jaywalking. He is soon assigned to investigate a double-murder, one not involving O.J., and find a missing autistic child. Willis finds that kid and beings to think something is fishy as more professional attempt are made on the child's life.

Let me pause for just a minute to say that of all the films I have had the opportunity to screen, up to and including that WWF video with Stone Cold Steve Austin, I can't for a moment think of another film that had so damn many large, gaping yawning holes in the script. Compared to Mercury Rising, films like Pauly Shore's In the Army Now and The Care Bear Adventure appear to have well thought out and Oscar caliber scripts. The reason for this is simple. Bad scripts normally follow one of the two paths: 1) those that are just plain unrealistic and 2) those that leave vast amounts of loose ends around, never bothering to make sense of any of the unexplained actions. Mercury Rising's script, feeling especially ambitious, somehow manages to do both.

For some reason, I can accept the plot of Face/Off, a film where two characters literally switch faces, but for the life of me, I can't buy Mercury Rising's premise: the autistic child has unknowingly and unwittingly cracked the $5 gazillion government code that is currently protecting just about every secret document the United States has. Maybe--and I say 'maybe' only because I saw Rain Man--an autistic person could crack a secret code, but that's not the part of this one with which I'm having the most amount of trouble. My trouble comes with the fact the our government decides to spend $189 bajillion on a top-secret code, implement it, and then decided to test it by writing an encoded message in a children's puzzle magazine. $400 for a hammer, okay, but even those bureaucrats knew to test the damn hammer before using it. Who spends $432 hundred thousand million on something and then tests it? And why a children's puzzle magazine, as opposed to MacWorld, Scientific American, Hustler, or another magazine that you can be fairly sure the eggheads are reading? Why, if this government code is so damn important would the NSA (National Security Agency) send just one God damn hitman to take care of the autistic child? If this is me, and I'm preaching the 'sacrifice of one for the benefit of many' trash that Alec Baldwin was preaching, I'm going to send a team. I will call the SEALS, I will call Special Forces, I will call that strange looking guy in the park with the mismatching shoes, and I will call Steven Seagal. I will call anybody and everybody it takes to get the job done; I will not call just one man and tell him to keep things quiet.

For your additional viewing disgust, the quality of Mercury Rising's special effects mirror the quality of the script. The stunts themselves are rather impressive, but the use of blue screens, especially while Willis is fighting a bad guy on the 'L' is as bad as the use of blue screens on old Saturday Night Live episodes of 'Toonces the Driving Cat'.

Mercury Rising was shot on location in Chicago, and its use of our fair city's landscape is quite good, but that is the only positive you will be able to find in this film. If this was on cable, you might keep it on because of the setting, but you will be hard pressed to find anything else worth watching in this film.