Mercury Rising

Staring: Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Chi McBride, Kim Dickens

Review by The Ranting WolfCastle

    The best part of this movie was the trailer for "Twenty Four Seven" at the beginning.  That's a Bob Hoskins flick if you didn't know.   But the actually movie wasn't bad, it's moreover just a typical action movie.

    Bruce Willis stars as a veteran FBI agent, who at the beginning of the film is demoted for being a paranoid delusional.  It isn't long before he stumbles across a case in which an autistic boy cracks a government's super code.   The NSA doesn't want the code to get out of course, so they want to kill the boy.   Bruce, being the namesake of the film, has to protect the kid from the evil government.

    I would have liked to give this film a better rating, Bruce Willis is one of my favorite actors so I enjoyed it, but it just didn't do much for me.   Alec Baldwin always plays the same character whether it be a good guy or bad, (this time it's a bad guy) and surprisingly, he didn't really have too much screen time. 

    This really wasn't an original plot at all, the only thing that made it differ from the norm is it had an autistic kid.  I don't know that kid's name, but he was really good in this film.  The character was kind of annoying, but that's the writer's fault.  And if you want to talk about annoying characters, there's also this one other lady who doesn't have a very big part, but she drove me crazy (in a bad way) every second she was on screen.

    I pretty much have one word to describe the entire movie: cliche.   Just about every action movie cliche is embedded in the script, the bad guys have no conscience, the good guys always seem to know what's going on before anyone else, and (I hope I'm not giving anything away) the ending is, of course, a happy one.  The bad guy even falls off a fifty story building into a glass room.  If that's not typical I don't know what is.  The only major cliche that wasn't in this film, is there was no plot line (meaning there was no woman for Bruce to hook up with).  Sorry if my lingo doesn't agree with yours.  There actually was one lady that I thought Bruce would get with, but they don't.  It's probably for the better.  And then there was the ever touching, ever heartfelt point where Bruce goes to see the boy at his school, the boy recognizes him, gets up, and gives him a hug.  Roll credits.

    Now that I look back, fifty percent is a very good score for this movie.  All it had to my liking was Bruce Willis, who is always great. 

    I'm sorry if I have divulged any information that may ruin your first viewing of this film, but you know you would have guessed it ahead of time anyway.   At any rate, the boy was good, the plot lacked, the supporting actors have a "Temple of Doom" type complex (meaning they are annoying), Bruce was good, and Alec was standard.

50%