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"Mercury Rising" is an action thriller movie. Art Jeffries (played by Bruce Willis) is an FBI agent. The movie shows at the outset that he values human life, especially the life of an innocent child, above convenience and the opinions of his superiors. For this reason, his professional reputation is already being questioned. As fate would have it, he is the person sent to a gruesome crime scene in which a couple has been murdered and their autistic nine year old son, Simon Lynch (played by Miko Hughes), is missing.

After he finds Simon hiding in the house, another attempt on his life makes it clear that this child was the real target. Over time, Art gradually makes it his personal mission to keep the child alive, find out who is behind this and why, and get justice for the boy. He eventually learns that Simon is an idiot-savant -- a freak of nature who is both mentally retarded and also mindbogglingly brilliant at some things. The thing Simon is good at happens to be solving puzzles. It turns out he called a phone number that you coud only find by deciphering an "unbreakable" government code, which was published in a puzzle book as a means to test its security.

The powers that be want Simon dead because he is viewed as a threat to national security. Art wants Simon protected. He can't even understand the importance of the code he broke. He probably does not even understand that breaking the code is why his parents have died and people are continuing to try to kill him. Art's attempts to protect Simon are complicated by the child's autism. The situation is made even worse by the fact that the men behind the assassinations have framed Art as Simon's "kidnapper" rather than his protector. Whether they both live or die hinges upon Art's ability to figure out whom to trust and how to prove the truth.

Mercury Rising is a 1998 action movie with a runtime of 1 hour and 51 minutes. It has received mostly poor reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 6.1 and a MetaScore of 37.