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FBI agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is entrusted with finding 9-year-old autistic savant, Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) following the sudden deaths of Simon's parents. But with assassins lurking round every corner, Jeffries suspects something's amiss and appoints himself as Simon's guardian. Seems Simon has cracked the government's latest and best super encryption code, making him a threat to national security. Miko Hughes turns in an excellent and believable performance as the autistic Simon.

Simon Lynch is an autistic child. This means that, among other problems, he has severe communication disorders. Like Dustin Hoffman's character, Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, his autism paradoxically is combined with instant intuitive perception of the solution to certain types of problems, notably those having to do with mathematics and puzzle solving. (Please see the links below for information on autism.)

Lt. Colonel Nicholas Kudrow of the US National Security Agency is the leader of a project to develop an unbreakable code Mercury that will protect US operatives and their information. The two NSA cryptography geeks, Crandell and Pedransky, who are responsible for the technical development take their job seriously. As part of validating Mercury, they want to rule out "the geek factor," so they arrange for a puzzle magazine to publish, inconspicuously among their other puzzles, a phone number that has been coded in Mercury. If anybody innocently cracks the code, they will call the number and Crandell and Pedransky will know that they have a problem.

Somebody does crack the code, and that somebody is Simon. Colonel Kudrow does not take the same benign view of the situation that Crandell and Pedransky do, and he dispatches an operative, so secret that he's listed as "dead" in the Agency's personnel archives, to eliminate Simon. The operative gets only as far as eliminating Simon's parents when he is interrupted. Before he can try again, a semi-renegade FBI man named Art Jeffries figures out that Simon's in trouble and dedicates himself to helping him, occasionally with Simon's cooperation.

Bruce Willis's films have been good, in part, because he can act. He can portray emotions that are more sophisticated than surprise, anger, or satisfaction. I have always admired Willis's professionalism, never more so than when he patiently undertook the thankless role of Carl Roebuck in the dramatic film Nobody's Fool and managed to add further distinction to a picture that already included exceptional performances by Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy.

Your typical Bruce Willis movie is at the high end of the Action-Adventure genre, much better than your typical Schwarzenegger, Seagal, or Van Damme movie. Mercury Rising is even better, although still not entering the realm of art.

One reason that Mercury Rising sets a higher standard is that it has some sense of the virtue of staying within limitations. It's enough for the villain to be a Lieutenant Colonel, albeit a politically powerful one for a particularly powerful and secret agency. The whole NSA isn't portrayed as corrupt, but only Kudrow and his secret operatives. Everyone else in the NSA who finds out what he is doing is willing to take large risks to stop him. Kudrow's goal is not world domination. He's power hungry and ruthless, but only in the ordinary sense that we read about in the newspapers. He has suave rationalizations about how what he's doing is for the good of the country (plus, of course, suitable recognition for himself). These excuses are even partly true, and this lets us focus on the more basic fact that, whether his rationalizations are valid or not, he's willing sacrifice a nine year old boy for them. Mercury Rising puts into motion the whole preposterous Action-Adventure picture arsenal, not to save the world from some gratuitously invented threat, but to save a boy who doesn't seem aware of needing to be saved.

Action movies have gone so far over the top so many times in recent years that there seems to be little novelty remaining to hope for. In any case, a steady diet of finding new and interesting ways of killing people never seemed very nourishing. After a while, it never even seemed like much fun. Apparently, Bruce Willis feels that the time has come to back off on that aspect and to try to fill the void with some human interest. Mercury Rising still has plenty of action. It's just not a competitor in the Mayhem Sweepstakes.

Mercury Rising has time to explore and develop things that don't contribute to plot momentum. We become familiar with Simon's routines, like helping his mother make his cocoa or waiting up at night for his father to sing to him. These scenes don't, as the common wisdom would have it, slow down the action. On the contrary, they speed it up by giving one the feeling that the film is moving rapidly, but under control, and by giving one a stake in the outcome of the action sequences.

The opening scene shows an episode in which Art Jeffries' efforts weren't successful. When these parts are put together with later events, one sees Jeffries not as an indestructible comic book superhero, but as a fallible human, with emotions, and basic decency.

Simon is played sensitively by Miko Hughes. He lives in a world that has its secrets, a world we can never know very much of. (Even those of us who are not autistic may sometimes have the feeling that others see us this way.) Simon lives a full life of emotion and thought within the confines of his different, and very limited, expressive opportunities. I admire the professional discipline with which Miko Hughes has accepted his responsibility to his character, enabling him to make these subtleties clear to us.

Mercury Rising shows Simon as likable, as someone capable of love and of being loved. The movie gives us a strong senseÐ'--through Simon, through Art Jeffries and, through many of its charactersÐ'--that people, autistic or otherwise, are not always predictable, that they can have sides to their personalities that are unexpected and marvellous. Certain of their features may make no sense to us taken in isolation, in our terms; but taken in context, in the other person's terms, they may make as much sense as anything could.

The film may be called Mercury Rising, but that title doesn't describe the trajectory taken by this motion picture, a routine thriller that combines government cover-ups with a cloying and poorly-motivated buddy story. The "hook" that is supposed to make Mercury Rising unique is that