MGM Studios
Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is a big issue these days, especially in the entertainment industry, so any film made recently is going to be under more scrutiny than the countless ones in years past. And what better way to discuss it than by throwing it against someone’s life on the line? And who better to be our protagonist than a disgraced, alcoholic, violent cop who’s strapped to a chair the entire movie?
Mercy comes from director Timur Bekmambetov, and writer Marco van Belle in his second feature film ever. The movie takes place in the near future, although we do see screens that say it’s August 2029 — due to increases in crime, the Los Angeles police have introduced a new AI-driven justice tool that views evidence in a theoretically dispassionate way and allows the arrested people to defend themselves in 90 minutes before being sentenced and executed. This is buoyed by requiring all people and businesses to connect all devices in LA to the ‘municipal cloud’ in a delightful overreach of privacy.
Chris Pratt plays detective Chris Raven (a name so bad it’s great — reminiscent of Tony Danza’s characters always being called Tony) who suddenly wakes up at the beginning of the movie chained to a chair in a green screen room. He is told by the AI judge (Rebecca Ferguson) who calls itself/herself ‘Judge Maddox’ in the ‘Mercy’ courtroom (naturally) and that he is on trial for killing his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis). He has 90 minutes (and the movie is just 10 minutes longer than that) with a convenient countdown clock to justify his innocence enough not to be killed — and he has access to the complete cloud to figure it all out. And Chris was the detective that brought the first defendant to the Mercy system.
So Chris must wrestle with this immediate rush of information as we are shown all the video evidence of his temper and violence, allowing for the hint of ambiguity. I mean, if this wasn’t this movie, it would be ambiguous, but it’s an interesting conceit. Chris sees a bunch of screens (which Chris the actor wouldn’t have seen, as his and Maddox’s parts are only in isolated rooms — feels very COVID except that the movie was filmed in 2024) and calls people like his partner Jaq (Kali Reis), AAA sponsor Rob (Chris Sullivan), or grieving, confused daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers) to solve the case.
Ultimately the movie gets a little confusing about its messaging — it has characters opposed to the privacy overreach and AI sentencing, but at the same time it implies that only this vast amount of surveillance can solve crimes. The movie also accidentally reveals limitations, like the AI judge asserting things but then after Chris asks to see videos of events recorded by cameras, new facts are revealed that a ‘perfect’ judge should have caught and processed.
The explicit message is that AI and humans make mistakes, but we can learn from them and work together. The twists of the movie are fine, but aren’t really mindblowing nor annoying, except for the last one, which was an unnecessary, illogical tag on the movie in its final moments. A lot of the logic of the film is pretty flimsy, and is relying on Chris’ performance to give us any positive feelings towards his character. I’d say that although he did a good job, the character is pretty thinly written, and other ones even thinner — when you discover people’s motivations later on, it’s simplistic and basic. It’s hard to really care about any of them.
That said, it’s a well paced movie — being just an hour and a 40 minutes is the perfect length for this sort of trifle. The judge keeps throwing new screens at us to keep our attention, and the idea of the movie literally playing in real time is an interesting idea. It’s a decent enough sort of stupid movie, not boring, probably will entertain well enough if you don’t mind forgetting it after a few minutes. The themes are basic and the messaging about surveillance and AI muddled and confused — but it feels like it wants to have its heart in the right place, maybe the next one will.
Mercy has a run time of 1 hour 40 minute, and is rated PG-13 for violence, bloody images, some strong language, drug content and teen smoking.
MGM Studios