And 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.

Actually, calling "Mercury Rising" a formula thriller suggests notes of complexity that aren't here. 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. Mix a boy, a hero and a villain in a bowl of overheated sentiment and lap it up.

The ingredients are laid out with a nonchalance bordering on parody. 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. Jeffries' subsequent outburst gets him reassigned to stakeouts.