Mercury Rising (1998)

	Also Known As: Code Mercury
	Year of first release: 1998
	Director: Harold Becker
	Actors: Bruce Willis (The 6th Sense, Die Hard 1-5), Miko Hughes, Alec Baldwin (The Hunt for Red October, Pearl Harbor)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Drama, Thriller, Polar
	Conditions of visioning: 12.11.2017, VOD, 40" TV screen
Synopsis: When a 9-year old autistic kid (Hughes) deciphers the latest military encryption code, an FBI agent (Willis) will have to protect him against the NSA agents that see him only as a threat.
Review: Teaming up Bruce Willis in a movie with any kid in the 90's would unavoidably have resulted in a buddy comedy, but if the kid is troubled, for example sees dead people like in The 6th Sense, then you get a hit. It is even more true when Willis plays an cop or FBI agent, a role in which we are used to see him tough, and that the kid is autistic, i.e. communication is nearly impossible and Willis has to reveal his soft side to get the trust of the kid. This encounter between the hard shell / soft core cop and the vulnerable kid is what works to perfection in Mercury Rising, maybe partly because we weren't expecting that from Bruce Willis who was still at the peak of his career at the end of the 90's. And he managed well to play both sides of the character like we rarely saw him doing: bad-ass action hero of course, but also sensitive and protective towards the kid, himself very touching and well played by Miko Hughes. We get even ore attached to their relationship that the "bad guys" (led by Baldwin) are particularly merciless as they are ready to kill a child. For a similar story but with an even more troubled guardian, I remember that there wss Man on Fire with Denzel Washington in 2004. Mercury Rising is yet another example that the 90's were not totally void of good movies, especially in the Thriller genre.
Rating: 7 /10