Mercury Rising

Comment:
I have to admit that I went to see Mercury Rising conscious that it would have been a bad movie. Given this resignation, I immediately started searching for plot holes, poorly thought scenes, unlikely events and so on... this obviously completely ruined the show or at least made it even worse that what it is on its own! Interestingly, I couldn't find anything in particular to criticize, this is just a standard movie where the director made a simple exercise of movie-making following all the previous examples of the genre without caring (and daring) to add a single innovation.

The plot is based around the possibly good but not completely new idea of an autistic boy, Simon, who has the special ability to solve complex puzzles and hence breaks a secret and supposedly secure cryptographic code that the N.S.A. was testing. In order to hide this flaw, an N.S.A. agent kills Simon's parents but somehow fails to kill him. At this point our hero (Art Jeffries a.k.a. Bruce Willis) gets the control of the situation, finds Simon and saves him from further troubles, discovers who is responsible of the whole 'plot' (an important N.S.A. official) and, you can guess it, has a fight with him and wins!

My major objection to this movie is the strictly commercial idea of producing a low-budget and mediocre action movie starring Bruce Willis knowing that people will go to see it regardless of its actual qualities. It is far too simple to turn a bad TV movie into a commercially successful mainstream movie by simply casting Bruce Willis but I wonder if this will still be true after the third or fourth consecutive The Jackal, Mercury Rising and then what? The Siege maybe?

I have nothing against Bruce Willis himself, he isn't actually bad in his usual role but then it is not very difficult to play it given all this previous similar experiences! I suppose that sooner or later they'll manage to build a 'sensible' movie using only the scenes edited out of all his past movies...

Back to Mercury Rising, at the beginning is is quite boring but then the rhythm improves a bit and the story becomes a bit more interesting. I suppose that the director wanted to make the movie quick and dynamic, so he had the silly idea to shorten the time-line and to make everything happen far too quickly to be credible. The short chases and searches, the bad guys finding the good ones too easily (but only managing to kill 'secondary' characters!), these details make the movie too unlikely and sometimes irritating.

Probably forced by the "politically correct" tendency, the script includes some pointless characters such as the young woman that helps Art and Simon without asking any question. In the end, all the minor criticisms above slowly add up for the whole duration of the movie and completely ruins the fiction, making Mercury Rising hard to digest and removing most of the entertaining properties that an action movie should have.