Mercury Rising
| Mercury Rising | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Harold Becker |
| Produced by |
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| Written by |
Novel: Ryne Douglas Pearson Screenplay: Lawrence Konner Mark Rosenthal |
| Starring | |
| Music by | John Barry |
| Cinematography | Michael Seresin |
| Edited by | Peter Honess |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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111 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $60 million |
| Box office | $93.1 million |
Mercury Rising is a 1998 American political action thriller film starring Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin. Directed by Harold Becker, the movie is based on Ryne Douglas Pearson's 1996 novel originally published as Simple Simon. Willis plays Art Jeffries, an undercover FBI agent who protects a 9-year-old boy with autism who is targeted by government assassins after he cracks a top secret government code.
The film was released on April 3, 1998, on Alec Baldwin's 40th birthday. It received mostly negative reviews.
A hostage situation in South Dakota: FBI Agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis), as the inside man, protects a teenage boy named James while trying to talk bank robber Edgar Halstrom (Richard Riehle) into surrendering. However, the FBI task force moves in, and in the ensuing firefight both James and the robbers are killed. Jeffries confronts his superior, Hartley, who tells him they both must answer to Washington. An infuriated Jeffries punches Hartley in reply.
A cryptographic code called "Mercury" was created by the National Security Agency and is allegedly so complex that its creators believe no computer on Earth can decipher it. Originally it was created during the Reagan Administration as a test to keep the United States' highest priority secrets under wraps. One day, the NSA receives a message from a 9-year-old autistic savant with prodigious math abilities named Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes), who calls a telephone number written in the code which was secretly published in a puzzle magazine by two of the creators, Dean Crandell (Robert Stanton) and Leo Pedranski (Bodhi Elfman), to see if anyone could break it. Crandell and Pedranski's division chief, Lt. Colonel Nicholas Kudrow (Alec Baldwin) sees the boy's ability to decipher the code as a grave liability. He dispatches assassin Peter Burrell (Lindsey Lee Ginter) to murder the boy and his parents, Martin (John Carroll Lynch) and Jenny (Kelley Hazen).
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Wikipedia