Mercy

by Mike McGranaghan

Between last year’s War of the Worlds and this year’s Mercy, Amazon is apparently going all-in on movies where a big star yells at a computer screen for an hour-and-a-half. Judging from these two examples, there is no way to make that scenario sufficiently exciting to sustain a feature-length film. Director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) tries, but you can feel this thriller growing more and more stupid by the minute.

That’s a shame because the premise is kind of cool. Chris Pratt portrays Chris Raven, an LAPD detective who finds himself on trial for the murder of his wife – a murder he doesn’t remember committing. The catch is that, in this future society, the court has turned into an AI system that plays judge, jury, and executioner. (A system, incidentally, he helped establish.) Strapped into a chair facing a large monitor, Raven has 90 minutes to prove to Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) that he’s innocent. She gives him access to the internet cloud where every piece of digital information from the entire population is stored.

Things start off okay, as Raven reviews doorbell camera footage, digs through his wife’s cell phone log, and has his partner virtually walk him through the crime scene. After a while, watching him do this becomes repetitive, no matter how much Bekmambetov tries to spruce it up by having pop-up windows fill our screen. Making matters worse, Pratt and Ferguson aren’t working together. They’re filmed separately, so there isn’t any chemistry between them. He emotes like a fiend in his chair; she exudes a typically impersonal AI vibe on the monitor. It’s not particularly interesting to watch.

The final act attempts to compensate for the static nature of the first hour by turning into a full-fledged action movie. Unfortunately, the action takes place on – you guessed it – a screen. Raven watches it unfold from his seat, as security cameras and TV news crews capture what’s happening. This creates a distance between the audience and the action, which renders it less exciting than tedious. Scenes featuring what appears to be a flying police motorcycle, meanwhile, are just silly.

The approach might have worked if Mercy had a solid mystery at its core. It does not. A big conspiracy lies at the heart of the story, and Marco van Belle’s script goes to increasingly idiotic places to establish it. The finale hinges on a particularly contrived twist that’s borderline comical. Otherwise, the film trots out tired old cliches about characters who are secretly bad guys. This is an example of Screenwriting 101.

The best thing that can be said about Mercy is that Rebecca Ferguson is entirely convincing as an AI-generated figure. That’s a compliment (I think). All in all, the movie plays like someone fed Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report into an AI program and asked it to create a lousy clone.

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