Oh these many years ago, my thriller Simple Simon was made into the film Mercury Rising with Bruce Willis. The movie did meh at the box office, and I've always believed that there was one underlying reason for this: Keiko was missing.

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What...who?

Keiko Kimura. The true bad guy in Simple Simon...or bad girl in this case. And was she ever baaaaad.

Now, in the movie, most of the badness was handed off to a government killer (who died very early in my novel) and to a government functionary, played by Alec Baldwin. Because, you know, functionaries can take on the guy from Die Hard any day.

But I digress. Books change when they're adapted for the big screen. That's a reality I knew before, and which has only been cemented as necessary since I began working as a screenwriter a dozen years ago. But not every change works.

Why did losing Keiko hurt the film, in my opinion? Because she would have provided a worthy opponent for Bruce to eventually beat the crap out of...after he had been put through the ringer by her, of course. You see, Keiko had certain...tastes. Victims to her were meant to be savored before they were savaged.

Yeah, Keiko was a bit of a psycho-sexual freak. But that's what made her different. She was sleek and beautiful and skilled and would be terribly fun at a party if you wanted every secret extracted from your guests before they were brutally eliminated.

In other words, Bruce would have faced an adversary with an agenda beyond simply killing him to get to Simon. She would have craved damaging him first. The mere thought of that would have heightened the expectation of jeopardy facing Simon.

And that, I truly believe, would have removed the meh factor.