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For this week's movie review and for the first of the term I went up to Portland for the premiere of Mercury Rising. The only thing I noticed rising during parts of the movie was my lunch. It stars Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, along with an excellent performance by a nine year old kid. This kid plays an autistic savant, or in laymen's terms, he's a foot shorter version of Rain Man. While looking through a puzzle book he sees a phone number in the confusion of numbers and symbols, calls it, and gets a direct link to the people who constructed a high tech code. For the FBI by breaking this unbreakable code Alec sees it as a terrible breach to the nation's security and therefore sends to have the kid and his family killed. The thug succeeds in killing ma and pop, but the boy hides. Bruce Willis, our tough guy, is called in, he finds the boy, and takes him with him when he sees the child has special needs. Junior reacts violently, and the two are off. Nevertheless, the code boys get upset with what they consider a poor decision on Alec's part, so to up the body count they get capped too. Throughout the whole movie gunfire goes off on either side of them, they find some stranger lady off the street to help them, and they're on the move again. Mercury may be rising, but my attention wasn't. It might have helped if I hadn't seen this story line in all of the other slightly different formats, a hundred times before. The bad guy is bad, he has a gun, he misses every time he fires unless the actor is the star. I was also impressed at Bruce's ability to provide psychiatric support for this scarred kid, when Bruce's character is supposed to be just about as screwed up as his patient. Not since the kid from The Shining have I seen such a gripping performance. Redrum.. Redrum. In my humble opinion all the acting with the exception of the kid was nothing special. Nothing about the story line particularly grabbed my attention, and the only thing that brought any emotion out of me for the whole time was the guy sitting next to me passing gas. In a packed theater there are certain things you do and don't do. One of them apparently is sit next to the fat guy with two empty popcorn tubs next to him and another in his lap. It was cool however to be at the premiere and represent Out and About proper. All I have to say is they treated us like kings. Burger King. Lines were huge, and with the amount of premiere passes they handed out, to quote Bill Clinton, even Joe six pack was there with his kids. Still it was fun and I had a good time. The movie was mildly entertaining if you don't care much about things like plot and originality, the acting was decent if character development isn't necessarily your thing, and the array of special effects had me thinking a Commodore 64 was they're machine of choice. From the sound of it you may be saying to yourselves, wow case, this movie must have been terrible, but I'll stop just short of saying that, because there were a few times when I was enjoying myself. Not a picture to get excited enough to see in the evening, but for an economy showing you'll get your three bucks worth. That's why I give Mercury Rising, our first movie of spring term a mediocre 5 couches out of ten. Make sure to tune in next week when I see another movie, and find a new and exciting way to berate it, with that special little edge all the other reviews tend to bring, and that my friends is called Case Style. Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:45:12 AM |