Review: MERCY

 by Rob DiCristino

Death, taxes, and January trash, babbbbbbbbbby!

A socio-political techno-thriller custom-made for MGM Amazon Studios’ Prime overnight delivery service, Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy may just end up being the definitive film of the A.I. era (era): It’s a half-heartedly plagiarized affair skimmed from half a dozen Google searches about superior films like RoboCop, Dredd, and Minority Report, a January action programmer with just enough brains to pose questions about the intersection between technology and justice but nowhere near enough curiosity to care about any of the answers. While only one of its overqualified lead actors is actually playing an A.I. chatbot — and an unnervingly sexy one, at that — just about every character in Mercy feels like they’ve been coated with a thick layer of deepfake gloss, that uncanny sheen of artificiality that’s become so pervasive in our Tik-Toking hellscape. Perhaps it’s just a stylistic choice. Perhaps it’s just the byproduct of shoddy 3D post-conversion. Perhaps — as in most cases involving A.I. — it’s just that no one felt like working hard enough to actually get it right.

Anyway, we begin in medias res as LAPD detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up from a midday bender strapped to a chair and face-to-face with the imperious Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), an artificially-intelligent supercomputer who — for reasons that will become perplexing in just a minute — quickly launches into an expository monologue about Mercy Court, America’s latest innovation in criminal justice: The year is 2029, and an uptick in civil unrest has prompted the federal government to convert large swaths of Los Angeles into walled-off Red Zones where criminality is allowed to run rampant — go ahead and add Escape from New York to Mercy’s sizable list of “influences” — and violent offenders are tried not by a jury of their peers but by — you guessed it — A.I. judges like Maddox. Once one of the instrumental figures in the founding of Mercy Court, Det. Raven now finds himself on trial for his wife’s murder, with only ninety minutes to prove that the system he so proudly touted as infallible and impartial has actually made a fatal error.

Now, why would Raven need a crash course on Mercy if he’s the one who spearheaded it in the first place? Don’t worry about it! Will this life-or-death struggle force the detective to confront his hubris and engender some empathy for the would-be killers he so enthusiastically doomed to die? Stop asking questions, nerd! What matters is that Raven gets out of this chair before the credits roll, and Maddox is ready to provide him with every phone record, camera feed, and email transcript in the cloud needed to make that happen. Staring down at this doomed soul like a sensual, angular Wizard of Oz — Do I have a problem? — Maddox walks Raven through the state’s evidence and reminds him that Mercy considers a defendant guilty unless they can get his “reasonable doubt” meter to drop below 90-something percent. So, wait. Maddox acts as defense and prosecution? Seems like it! Are defendants allowed independent counsel? No! Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Probably! Is 2029 a generous estimate for when this will happen in real life? Yes!

Allegedly shot over Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson’s lunch breaks from next year’s tentpole blockbusters — alleged by me; It’s me who’s alleging that — Mercy is ideal watch-on-your-phone Content, an ugly, pea-brained pot-boiler entirely beholden to better movies and hoping beyond hope that its audience lacks the cultural literacy to recognize the brazenness of its counterfeiting. However, while he may lack John Carpenter’s razor-sharp cynicism and Paul Verhoeven’s satirical wit, director Timur Bekmambetov — who recently pivoted to producing self-styled “screenlife” thrillers like Searching and War of the Worlds (2025) after establishing himself with C-grade genre fare like Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — may actually have developed the only coherent defense against our “second-screening” entertainment future: Rather than fight audiences’ decaying attention spans, why not turn cinema itself into an interactive circus of social media, email, and selfie video footage? It’s just like the Lumiere Brothers always imagined!

Running just under ninety minutes soaking wet, Mercy is at least a breezy viewing experience that knows it has no business asking Rebecca Ferguson to put down her coffee and get out of her chair. Instead, our Swedish action mommy is set comfortably inside a series of Command & Conquer cutscenes while the worst Chris prattles and sneers at the camera until it’s time to break out and do action hero things in the action hero climax. Marco van Belle’s screenplay never bothers to make Raven charming or cunning — he’s negligent, abusive, and casually fascist, but That Doesn’t Make Him a Killer — and its ultimate thesis on A.I.’s place in the justice system amounts to a befuddled shrug and some platitudes about how “we all make mistakes.” Familiar faces like Kenneth Choi and Annabelle Wallis tag-team in and out of the background for a bit, while heavyweight boxer-turned-True Detective star Kali Reis flitters around on a flying motorcycle someone stole from the set of Tron: Ares. It’s all very forgettable, but that’s January, babbbbbbbyyy!

Mercy hits U.S. theaters on Friday, January 23rd.