Opening in theaters on January 23 is ‘Mercy,’ directed by Timur Bekmambetov and starring Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan, and Kylie Rogers.
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Initial Thoughts
‘Mercy,’ a new sci-fi crime thriller starring Chris Pratt, arrives at a rather unfortunate time. The film’s scenes of a dystopian Los Angeles riddled with crime, anarchy, and drugs may seem like certain government officials’ feverish imaginations of how big cities really look, while the constant video surveillance and instant sentencing in A.I.-run courts – where trials are over in 90 minutes – might seem like a positive approach to them as well.
We’re not quite there yet, but the potentially provocative message half-heartedly presented by ‘Mercy’ gets muddled and buried in this otherwise flat thriller. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov in the Screenlife style that he favors these days (which features prominently in movies he’s produced like ‘Unfriended’ and ‘Searching’), ‘Mercy’ has some eerie parallels to the current moment but is an otherwise derivative, generic procedural.
Story and Direction
The year is 2029. Crime runs rampant throughout Los Angeles and other major cities, leading the government to institute a massive surveillance network in which every citizen’s mobile device, every doorbell cam, every public camera – every form of audiovisual communication – is monitored by the authorities. And should a person be accused of a crime, they are arrested and taken to the Mercy Court, where an A.I. acts as judge, jury, and – if at the end of a 90-minute trial you are convicted – executioner, killing you right there in the so-called Mercy Chair.
Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt), a recovering alcoholic, wakes up in the Mercy Chair with no memory of the previous evening or morning to learn that he is accused of murdering his wife (Annabelle Wallis) in their home. The A.I. presiding over his case, Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), has a wealth of video and circumstantial evidence with which to convict him. But Raven – a proponent of the Mercy system – is convinced that even with his problems, there’s no way he would kill his wife. Can he assemble his own defense – including testimony from his daughter (Kylie Rogers) and sponsor (Chris Sullivan) – in 90 minutes, all while strapped to the death chair?
It wouldn’t be off-base to say that ‘Mercy’ reads like an off-brand combination of ‘Minority Report’ and ‘Judge Dredd,’ with Pratt’s Raven a mix of both protagonists. This is a near-future distillation of the ideas expressed in those and other properties about freedom, totalitarianism, and so on, with the surface relevance of A.I. sprinkled over it. But while highly derivative, ‘Mercy’ doesn’t add anything new to the conversation. And at a time when both A.I. and authoritarianism are legitimate existential threats to society, the film pays brief lip service to those ideas before turning into a routine police procedural with predictable villains and a pre-ordained outcome. It never digs into what’s really wrong with the system in the film — A.I. almost comes out as the hero.
Bekmambetov has apparently shot the movie for IMAX, which makes the Screenlife presentation – a large chunk of the story is told through screens, phones, cams, and the like in an increasingly frenetic, cluttered fashion – an odd choice. The rest of the movie consists of extreme close-ups of either Pratt or Ferguson’s faces, making the whole thing seem even smaller. There is some excitement and suspense generated during a few sequences, but otherwise ‘Mercy’ never fully comes to life.
Cast and Performances
Chris Pratt is good at playing either lovable, action-oriented goofballs or everyman action heroes, but anything beyond that might be trouble. Chris Raven is supposed to be a decent cop brought down by the bottle and grief, but Pratt doesn’t quite have the gravitas to pull off what’s supposed to be a deeply flawed character. Nor can he portray anything complex with the camera stuck on his face for much of the running time. This isn’t a good role for him, and between this and last year’s woeful ‘The Electric State,’ he needs to recalibrate.
The best performance in ‘Mercy’ is from Rebecca Ferguson, whose piercing eyes and unnerving stillness actually make for quite an eerie simulation of artificial intelligence. There are moments when a strange smile slips across her face, and others where she goes creepily blank, that will have you believe you’re watching some form of sentience trying to imitate a human. The script lets her down too in the end, but she’s believable as an unknowable entity with the power of life and death.
Final Thoughts
The derivative nature of ‘Mercy’ and its claustrophobic use of the Screenlife aesthetic to tell its story would perhaps be alleviated if there was a story there worth telling. But the movie can’t even get its mixed messages straight. At a time when we’re seeing the very real damage that A.I. can do, ‘Mercy’ almost sidesteps that question entirely.
The simplistic ‘everyone makes mistakes’ theme doesn’t really hack it here, not with the complicated issues that the movie deals with only in the most superficial way. For a movie that touches on issues affecting us literally as this is being typed, ‘Mercy’ feels like it’s exploiting those same issues for a throwback to a less intelligent kind of sci-fi movie.
‘Mercy’ receives a score of 50 out of 100.
What is the plot of ‘Mercy’?
In the near future, a detective (Chris Pratt) stands on trial accused of murdering his wife. He has 90 minutes to prove his innocence to the advanced A.I. judge (Rebecca Ferguson) he once championed, before it determines his fate.
Who is in the cast of ‘Mercy’?
- Chris Pratt as Detective Chris Raven
- Rebecca Ferguson as Judge Maddox
- Annabelle Wallis as Nicole Raven
- Kylie Rogers as Britt Raven
- Kali Reis as Jacqueline “Jaq” Diallo
- Chris Sullivan as Rob Nelson
- Kenneth Choi as Ray Vale
- Rafi Gavron as Holt Charles
List of Timur Bekmambetov Movies:
- ‘Peshawar Waltz‘ (1994)
- ‘The Arena‘ (2001)
- ‘Night Watch’ (2006)
- ‘Day Watch‘ (2007)
- ‘The Irony of Fate:Continuation‘ (2007)
- ‘Wanted‘ (2008)
- ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter‘ (2012)
- ‘Ben-Hur‘ (2016)
- ‘Profile‘ (2021)
- ‘V2 Escape from Hell‘ (2021)
- ‘Mercy’ (2026)
