#MERCURY RISING MOVIE#
#MERCURY RISING CODE#

For example, it can contaminate water supplies and harm wildlife.Īs demand for gold increases, so too does the risk of mercury poisoning in miners and others who come into contact with the metal.

When released into the atmosphere, mercury can travel great distances and cause serious environmental damage. Mining companies must adhere to strict regulations when it comes to handling and disposing of mercury. And while only a small percentage of gold is made up of mercury, it's still an important pollutant in mining operations. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has classified mercury as a “hazardous waste” because of its toxicity. But while gold mining is a lucrative business, it also comes with a cost. * In general release throughout Southern California.As the price of gold climbs, so too does the demand for mining companies to extract the precious metal from the ground. Set design Jeff Adam, Karen Fletcher, Andrew Menzies. Art direction Jim Truesdale, Steve Saklad. Production design Patrizia von Brandenstein. From Ryne Douglas Pearson’s novel “Simple Simon.” Cinematography Michael Seresin. Screenplay Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal. Times guidelines: child in constant peril.Ī Brian Grazer production, released by Universal Pictures. * MPAA rating: R, for violence and language. If James Cameron wants to convince people what a fine writer he is, he should offer “Mercury Rising” as a comparison.

#MERCURY RISING MOVIE#

They add nothing to their good cop/bad cop caricatures, and they don’t even share a scene until the movie lumbers into its last, numbingly cliched act. Willis and Baldwin are operating under their own battery power. Still, Simon is the most complicated character in the film, and Hughes is at least trying. Autistics do have speech and coordination problems, but Simon’s problems are related to a more commonly understood condition: bad direction. He speaks in a robotic voice, walks as if battery-operated, and he doesn’t just avoid eye contact, his eyes float in the sockets, as if there were no muscles attached. Hughes is working so hard to stay in character, all you see is the effort.

#MERCURY RISING CODE#

Nicholas Kudrow, who decides that in order to protect the lives of the spies for whom the code was created, the boy must be “erased.”ĭustin Hoffman had it down pretty well in “Rain Man,” and won an Oscar for it. Meanwhile, the autistic Simon Lynch, while paging through a puzzle magazine, reads an encrypted message and calls its 1-800 number, alerting the startled Pentagon computer geeks on the other end to the fact that the sophisticated Mercury code, as unbreakable as the Titanic was unsinkable, has been broken. Jeffries’ subsequent outburst gets him reassigned to stakeouts. In the opening scene, Willis’ Art Jeffries is on an undercover job when overeager colleagues jump the gun and kill five people, including a teenage boy to whom Jeffries has formed a paternal bond. The ingredients are laid out with a nonchalance bordering on parody. Mix a boy, a hero and a villain in a bowl of overheated sentiment and lap it up. The script, by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (“Cop and a Half,” “The Beverly Hillbillies”), from the novel “Simple Simon” by Ryne Douglas Pearson, is more like a recipe for simple syrup.

Not every day, more like every week.Īnd this week, it’s Harold Becker’s “Mercury Rising,” the latest formula thriller out of Hollywood, starring Bruce Willis as a dog-housed FBI agent a slumming Alec Baldwin, as a murderously zealous National Security Agency official and young Miko Hughes, as the 9-year-old autistic savant whose ability to decipher a top-secret Pentagon code makes him the target of government assassins.Īctually, calling “Mercury Rising” a formula thriller suggests notes of complexity that aren’t here. Here’s something you don’t see every day, a movie about a righteous, stubbornly independent lawman who gets in trouble with his department and has to evade his own arrest while chasing down the real bad guys.

Mercury rising