Mercury Rising

About Mercury Rising

Mercury Rising is a 1998 action thriller feature 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. Bruce Willis plays Art Jeffries, an undercover FBI agent who protects a nine-year-old autistic boy who is the target for assassins after cracking a top secret government code.

A cryptographic code called "Mercury" was created by the National Security Agency, so complex that its creators believe no computer on earth can decipher it. Originally created during the Reagan Administration as a test to keep the United States' highest priority secrets under wraps, their assumption is revealed to be false when they receive a message from an autistic savant boy 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 to see if anyone could break it. Colonel Kudrow (Alec Baldwin), perceiving the boy's ability to decipher the code as a liability, seeks to silence Simon; he sends a hit man to murder Simon and his family.

After killing the boy's parents, the assassin searches the house, fails to find Simon, and leaves at the sound of approaching sirens. Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is an undercover FBI agent who protects Simon. He finds Simon hiding in a cache of his bedroom closet and takes the boy under his wing. Jeffries begins to realize the difficulty of protecting, let alone questioning Simon, because of his impaired social abilities as a result of his autism. The situation is further complicated by the fact that nobody at the FBI believes Simon is in any danger, and Jeffries is soon painted by the NSA as a kidnapper.