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FBI agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is entrusted with finding 9-year-old autistic savant, Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) following the sudden deaths of Simon's parents. But with assassins lurking round every corner, Jeffries suspects something's amiss and appoints himself as Simon's guardian. Seems Simon has cracked the government's latest and best super encryption code, making him a threat to national security. Miko Hughes turns in an excellent and believable performance as the autistic Simon.

Simon Lynch is an autistic child. This means that, among other problems, he has severe communication disorders. Like Dustin Hoffman's character, Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, his autism paradoxically is combined with instant intuitive perception of the solution to certain types of problems, notably those having to do with mathematics and puzzle solving. (Please see the links below for information on autism.)

Lt. Colonel Nicholas Kudrow of the US National Security Agency is the leader of a project to develop an unbreakable code Mercury that will protect US operatives and their information. The two NSA cryptography geeks, Crandell and Pedransky, who are responsible for the technical development take their job seriously. As part of validating Mercury, they want to rule out "the geek factor," so they arrange for a puzzle magazine to publish, inconspicuously among their other puzzles, a phone number that has been coded in Mercury. If anybody innocently cracks the code, they will call the number and Crandell and Pedransky will know that they have a problem.

Somebody does crack the code, and that somebody is Simon. Colonel Kudrow does not take the same benign view of the situation that Crandell and Pedransky do, and he dispatches an operative, so secret that he's listed as "dead" in the Agency's personnel archives, to eliminate Simon. The operative gets only as far as eliminating Simon's parents when he is interrupted. Before he can try again, a semi-renegade FBI man named Art Jeffries figures out that Simon's in trouble and dedicates himself to helping him, occasionally with Simon's cooperation.

Bruce Willis's films have been good, in part, because he can act. He can portray emotions that are more sophisticated than surprise, anger, or satisfaction. I have always admired Willis's professionalism, never more so than when he patiently undertook the thankless role of Carl Roebuck in the dramatic film Nobody's Fool and managed to add further distinction to a picture that already included exceptional performances by Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy.

Your typical Bruce Willis movie is at the high end of the Action-Adventure genre, much better than your typical Schwarzenegger, Seagal, or Van Damme movie. Mercury Rising is even better, although still not entering the realm of art.

One reason that Mercury Rising sets a higher standard is that it has some sense of the virtue of staying within limitations. It's enough for the villain to be a Lieutenant Colonel, albeit a politically powerful one for a particularly powerful and secret agency. The whole NSA isn't portrayed as corrupt, but only Kudrow and his secret operatives. Everyone else in the NSA who finds out what he is doing is willing to take large risks to stop him. Kudrow's goal is not world domination. He's power hungry and ruthless, but only in the ordinary sense that we read about in the newspapers. He has suave rationalizations about how what he's doing is for the good of the country (plus, of course, suitable recognition for himself).