Mercury Rising (1998)

Mercury Rising arrives from 1998, a year when a studio thriller could still be assembled from a maverick agent, a shadowy government conspiracy, and a child in peril without anyone consulting a spreadsheet of demographic targets. Bruce Willis plays Art Jeffries, an FBI man demoted to desk duty, who stumbles onto a scheme in which the National Security Agency has dispatched assassins to silence a nine-year-old boy. The boy solved a puzzle in a magazine and dialed a number that cracked the agency's unbreakable cipher. This is a plot, not a thesis. The film wants to be a chase, and mostly it is one.

The production does devote real screen time to Simon's autism. A hospital nurse sits Art down and explains the condition in language calibrated for a general audience, which is the closest the picture comes to a public service announcement. Simon is a savant of the dated variety, gifted at cryptanalysis and otherwise treated as a locked door the hero must learn to open with patience. Miko Hughes plays him with a stillness that survives the script's worst impulses. The film never argues for accommodation or inclusion. It needs a child whose mind works differently, and it takes a moment to say so plainly.

The antagonists are bureaucrats, not board members. There is no corporation to indict, no class grievance to air, no environmental subtext, and no interest in the racial or gendered dimensions of its own cast. Chi McBride and Kim Dickens appear as loyal helpers, competent and underused, present because the formula requires a friendly agent and a woman to mind the boy. The result is a joyless, competent thriller with a faint humanitarian streak and a Razzie for its star. The cultural weather here is 1998, and the forecast was cloudy.