It must be Thanksgiving in January, there's no other way to explain a turkey of this magnitude.
Mercy is a film that tries so hard to be timely that it feels immediately dated. Were it a product of the 2000s, it could probably work as a quaint relic of a time when pop culture just didn't know any better. Released today, it reeks of ugly politics cynically hoping nobody remembers better films like Minority Report.
Chris Pratt plays a cop loaded with tragedy. He's a violent drunk with a history of abuse and a stunning lack of personality, who wakes up one day accused of murdering his wife. Before him stands Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) an AI judge that Pratt apparently had a hand in championing in the past.
Maddox is part of the Mercy program, a judge, jury, and executioner app that comes bundled with ads. We know this because the film (and Pratt's trial) begins with a helpful exposition dump about how any of this works. In this world, there are no judges, juries, or lawyers. Instead, the accused have to defend themselves in 90 minutes to Ferguson's fickle AI creation or face an instant death sentence.
How this works is entirely left up in the air. There's some jargon about how the world is now more dangerous than ever because of civil unrest, so naturally the logical answer is the creation of a police state. Within minutes, we understand that everyone is monitored at all times, and Maddox can recreate holograms of every location at the drop of a hat.
At one point, Pratt asks Maddox to show him what his partner sees on the phone. In a second, Maddox recreates the entire scene in a dazzling hologram as if Pratt was there in person. Sometimes she pulls up entire documents and videos from obscure systems, implying this is a future where everyone actually cares about what they name their files.
Hang on, I hear you say, can't Maddox then just recreate the inside of the house where Pratt's accused crime took place earlier? Wouldn't it be possible to know everything or every potential crime within seconds because of how monitored this fantasy world is?
Ah, but there was a server outage at this particular time at this particular place. It will take time for the material to buffer, says Maddox. At one point, we even see a hazy image of a hand in a place where it shouldn't, yet Maddox claims that brightening up the image is beyond her abilities.
It's like the scene in The Simpsons where Principal Skinner claims his burning kitchen just has super localized aurora borealis. In a desperate attempt to spin plates and keep the action going, Mercy paints itself in so many corners you could just call it a box.
In a film like this certain elements always work with the logic of drama. Things have to happen for the story to work, and that's fine. But it also needs to offer something compelling in return to make these leaps of logic worthwhile.
In Minority Report, it was the contradiction between the desire to prevent tragedies and the horrific misuse of determinism as justification for pre-crime. It forced the viewer to ask what would justice look like in a world built on an inherently broken system.
Mercy isn't interested in these kinds of questions, even though it cribs all the visual elements and ideas from far better inspirations. It is a deeply incurious and thoughtless movie that tries to have it both ways. If the system is broken, it's probably due to a user error. After all, this violent drunken cop gets results using the same tools, and he's the good guy!
In fact, Pratt's abusive cop is so good at what he does that even Ferguson's cold and just-the-facts AI starts to warm up to him. As if there's a clause in someone's contract that even digital women must show interest in the protagonist, however that works.
A more interesting filmmaker could probably make something out of a script this flat and unimpressive. Someone like Michael Bay would lean into the absurdities and visual tricks to overwhelm the viewer so entirely they didn't care about the ugly implications of the material itself. Director Timur Bekmambetov shows no interest in getting anything out of Mercy than is strictly necessary. This looks and feels like a direct-to-video production, but with an added whiff of copaganda it barely tries to hide.
Mercy is a film you forget as you watch it. It isn't funny enough to warrant a so-bad-it's-good sticker, nor is it subversive enough to deserve further study.
Pratt plays himself with all the conviction that role requires. Rebecca Ferguson FaceTime's her entirely role, which appears stitched together from dozens of takes into one incoherent compilation. The mystery is pointless, the action is tiresome, and the dialog doesn't matter. This is the very definition of second, even third screen content.
