A cozily Spielbergian story of a dad and his son and the bigger forces who are out to get them is rendered in Nichols’s usual earthy, muscular tones, so that little of Midnight Special plays in the key of schmaltz it easily could have—and did, in the similarly plotted Mercury Rising , a 1998 misfire in which Bruce Willis went on the lam with an autistic boy with government secrets locked away in his mind.
This set-up all sounds rather good, of course, and were it not for the splice-happy editing, the film might have come off as a sort of Deep South E.T. via Mercury Rising.