Bruce Willis fans will love this. The action starts early and rarely lets up.

It's the kind of movie you'd expect from the big-action hero, with adrenaline, knots in the stomach and white knuckles all the way, but without stretching credulity in the way the Die Hard trilogy did.

The biggest flaw in this movie is the tired use of almost every Hollywood cliche.

--The outcast hero -- FBI Agent Art Jeffries slugs his boss in front of everyone, with the resultant psych report labelling him delusional, paranoid and demoted from being the best undercover agent ever, to fugitive ... all in the first five minutes.

-- He can trust no one except a fateful old (chubby negro) mate in the office who has to put his own neck on the line to feed him crucial information.

-- He turns his back for one second and has to rescue the reluctant victim from a speeding train or hail of bullets.

-- The ten-foot-tall-and-bulletproof hit-man turns out to be Special Forces, reported killed in action ten years previous.

-- And the inevitable tug-at-the-heart-strings-to-finish.

The National Security Council has spent $2 billion developing an unbreakable encryption code, called Mercury. But with a titanic claim like that, something is bound to go wrong.

The two computer nerds who wrote Mercury invested a lot of time and effort into testing the code using giant mainframe computers and as an afterthought, put an encoded message in a kids puzzle magazine.

Simon is a nine-year-old autistic kid, so withdrawn that he needs to carry an instruction book on life; photos of his parents, a description of what home looks like, don't touch the cooker -- it may be hot, and other tit-bits for survival.

But he is a genius when it comes to solving puzzles.

He reads the Mercury-encrypted magazine puzzle as though it were plain English and when he phones the number given in the message, the bad guy (Alec Baldwin) sends out his hit man to tie-off loose ends.

And so enters Bruce, to the rescue.

When the death of Simon's parents is passed off as a murder/suicide by the local flatfoots, Agent Jeffries asks the pertinent question, how does a father, broke from looking after a retarded kid, afford a $1500 hand gun?

The hint of conspiracy is obvious to the delusional-paranoid, first-rate agent whom nobody trusts...

Miko Hughes' performance as Simon is on a par with the very similar Oscar-winning performance of Dustin Hoffman in The Rain Man.

Overlooking the formula/cliched storyline, Willis delivers the action seamlessly and credibly without resorting to the usual ultra-cool one-liners.