Mercury Rising (1998)

Directed by Harold Becker. Starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Kim Dickens, Chi McBride, Miko Hughes, Robert Stanton, Bodhi Elfman, Carrie Preston, L. L. Ginter, John Carroll Lynch, Kelley Hazen, Kevin Conway. [R]

Idiotic thriller where NSA code designers stick one of their codes into a puzzle book, which is subsequently solved by a young savant named Simon (Hughes), who also happens to be autistic. Their chief (Baldwin) decides the little boy and his family need to be eliminated pronto; downgraded FBI agent Willis, who failed to protect a young man in an earlier operation-gone-bad, seeks the redemption route by safeguarding Simon from those nefarious forces. Routine rehash of government conspiracy and endangered kid angles, with unbelievable characters and contrived situations piling up quickly; no effort is made to treat Hughes’ condition as anything besides a plot device, and the kid is constantly getting tossed around by his protectors and hunters like he’s nothing more than a prop. Based on Ryne Douglas Pearson’s novel, “Simple Simon” (the new name may be trite, but at least it doesn’t skirt the edge of offense), and contains such ludicrous tech-speak terms as “defractionate” and “velociraptor machines.”

35/100