Bruce Willis saves autistic savant in 'Mercury Rising'

By Stevie Emilia

JAKARTA (JP): When one decides to watch Mercury Rising, it is because Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin are the main actors.

But it turns out that 12-year-old actor, Miko Hughes, deserves more credit.

Playing a nine-year-old autistic savant, Hughes (Apollo 13, Spawn) reminds one of Dustin Hoffman in a similar role in the 1988 box-office Rain Man. The same back-and-fro movement of their bodies, eyes that avoid contact and their ability to raise one's sympathy.

The difference is that while Hoffman was a math genius, Hughes is a puzzle genius who can break a top-secret code, the Mercury Code, just by staring at it for a few seconds. An ability which puts him in ultimate danger.

And this is where Willis steps in: to protect the child, Simon Lynch, from an evil plot.

The opening itself is typical. A hostage situation where Willis, as undercover FBI agent Art Jeffries, fails to rescue teenage boys during a shootout.

Traumatized by the experience, not to mention being removed from his undercover job, Jeffries stumbles into a situation which he finds hard to ignore.

Assigned to investigate the disappearance of a boy whose parents were mysteriously killed, he finds the boy, Simon, hiding in the closet.

Trying to ease his conscience, Jeffries is determined to protect the boy on his own after a hit man tries to murder him at the hospital.

The storyline will certainly move viewers. A sensitive FBI agent trying to save an autistic child from being murdered.

But no surprises are thrown in by die-hard Willis in Mercury. He just delivers his quiet character, similar to his portrayal of the assassin in The Jackal.

And Baldwin's role as Lt. Col. Nicholas Kudrow is flat. He is just a typical bad guy, only with gorgeous looks and shiny hair.

In charge of protecting the Mercury Code, the supersecret code developed by the national security agency protecting American espionage operations around the world, Kudrow thought the code indecipherable.

Unknowingly, Simon breaks it -- the code has been put inside a common puzzle magazine.

Angered that the code was broken by a nine-year-old autistic, Kudrow becomes determined not to risk his career and uses whatever means to protect the code.

Indeed, without the help of an autistic character, the story would have been a plain action thriller.

But director Harold Becker, who directed Al Pacino in Sea of Love and City Hall and then Baldwin in Malice, gives a special human touch to Mercury. The human touch comes with the autistic boy and Willis as Mr. Sensitive.

In the steps of movie-making out of bestseller novels, Mercury is adopted from Ryne Douglas Pearson's Simple Simon.

Certainly, there are some adjustments, to make it fit in with Hollywood's taste. In the novel, for instance, Simon is 16, not nine.

And there are a few disturbing flaws.

Why does the agency send the same hit man over and over again even though Willis has identified him and even countered him during an attempted hit on Simon at the hospital? And why doesn't Willis do something to stop the killer after identifying him?

And it is hard to digest that Simon's father, after being shot in the middle of the forehead, manages to call 911 a moment later.

Too many coincidence also pepper the movie.

How can an FBI agent on the run just ask a nice young lady he meets at a cafe to look after Simon? And the same woman also gives them a place to stay at 2 a.m.?

But Willis' relationship with his young costar remains the nice touch. As the nurse in the film said, being autistic does not mean shutting out feelings, but becoming overwhelmed by them.