Review: Mercy

Mercy begins with a question it seems very proud of asking: what if ChatGPT could kill you? Not metaphorically ruin your afternoon or confidently hallucinate your demise, but literally execute you, right there in a courtroom, after skimming your browser history and deciding you’d had enough chances. It’s an enticing hook, one that promises a paranoid techno-thriller about surveillance, justice, and the quiet terror of living under an algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself. Unfortunately, Mercy is far more interested in reassuring us that everything would probably be fine.

Set in a near-future Los Angeles where crime has apparently been caused entirely by homelessness and civil unrest (always a good sign), society’s solution is the Mercy court: a sleek, AI-driven justice system where the accused are presumed guilty and given 90 minutes to prove otherwise before being painlessly executed. Presiding over this process is Judge Maddox, an artificial intelligence embodied by Rebecca Ferguson’s serene, immaculate face. She is calm, polite, and equipped with unfettered access to the totality of your digital life. It’s a nightmare scenario dressed up like a tech demo.

Enter Chris Pratt as Detective Chris Raven, a man who wakes up strapped into the Mercy chair, accused of murdering his wife, hungover, and missing a chunk of his memory. Raven is also, we soon learn, an abusive husband, an abusive father, a drunk, and a generally lousy cop. This isn’t moral complexity so much as narrative self-sabotage. Mercy seems to think it’s being daring by giving us an unlikeable protagonist, but it forgets the crucial step of making him interesting.

Pratt, operating in his most aggressively bland register, drains the film of whatever momentum it manages to build. Once the central gimmick, Raven barking commands at a screen as social media posts, bodycam footage, and emails fly toward the audience, runs dry about 25 minutes in, the film is left with a problem: it desperately wants us to care whether this man lives or dies, and gives us absolutely no reason to do so. Raven isn’t compelling, conflicted, or particularly smart. He’s just there, squinting at evidence and insisting on his innocence with the energy of someone arguing with customer support.

Director Timur Bekmambetov once again confuses constant motion for engagement. Windows swoosh, files expand, images rotate, and occasionally the film traps Raven inside a holographic recreation of past events, as if to remind us that cinema is still technically a visual medium. None of it helps. Mercy is visually inert, a movie about futuristic technology that somehow looks cheaper and flatter than your average Zoom call.

Rebecca Ferguson fares no better, though through no fault of her own. Asked to play an AI judge incapable of genuine emotion, she’s effectively muzzled, reduced to a calm voice and the faintest suggestion of curiosity. When the script flirts with the idea that Judge Maddox might be developing something like sentience, or at least doubt, it has no idea what to do with it. Either Mercy doesn’t understand how AI works, or it doesn’t care, which is arguably worse for a film so fixated on the subject.

As the plot lurches toward its conclusion, it piles on increasingly silly twists involving double-crosses and secret motivations, each one more desperate than the last. Instead of complicating its ideas, the film simplifies them to the point of absurdity, finally landing on the shrugging conclusion that “human or AI, we all make mistakes and we learn.” This is presented as a profound takeaway from a story about state-sanctioned, algorithmic capital punishment.

Mercy wants to look like Minority Report and sound like a warning, but it thinks like a pamphlet handed out at a tech conference. It imagines a police-state dystopia, then gently assures us it would work out with a few software updates and better vibes. Watching Chris Pratt sit in a chair for nearly two hours while an AI decides his fate isn’t provocative, or thrilling, or even especially suspenseful. It’s just dull. And in a future where machines decide who lives and dies, dull might be the most damning verdict of all.

1/5