Mercy review

MERCY: 

CHRIS PRATT VS AI SCI-FI FILM FEELS ARTIFICIAL! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: ** out of 4

MGM

Chris Pratt in Mercy

 

            Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jurassic World 1-3) is accused of murder and must prove his innocence to an artificial intelligence judge in Mercy, the new film from director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Ben-Hur (2016)). I’m not exactly a huge fan of Bekmambetov’s work personally, the only film he directed that I thought was legitimately good was 2008’s Wanted and even then I don’t think it’s a great movie or anything like that. 

            However, he’s had better success as a producer on certain projects like the 2009 animated feature, 9 which he produced alongside Tim Burton, the Unfriended movies were decent (Well, the first one mostly), and I really enjoyed the 2018 screen-life thriller, Searching and its 2023 sequel, Missing. He has shown that he does have talent when he knows what he’s doing or when he’s surrounded by other people to help bring the project to life. 

            I didn’t really have any expectations with Mercy when I watched the trailer, I like Chris Pratt and the premise could have a lot of potential even if it seemed reminiscent of other science-fiction stories. Well, I gave it a shot and…at least it’s not as bad as Amazon’s War of the Worlds movie from last year which Bekmambetov also produced, but this is certainly not a good film. 

            For a movie about a man fighting artificial intelligence, this film seems like it was made with artificial intelligence because just about everything about this movie is recycled from other, better films and stories of the genre with absolutely new added to it. If you’ve seen Minority Report, Demolition Man, either one of the Judge Dreddmovies, or Terminator 1 and 2 then you’ve already seen the better versions of this film. 

            The film is set in a futuristic Los Angeles where the Mercy Capital Court uses AI to put defendants on trial for violent crimes. When police detective Chris Raven (Pratt) is put into Mercy after being accused of murdering his wife, he must prove his innocence to AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson-Mission: Impossible franchise, Doctor Sleep,Dune trilogy) in 90 minutes or face execution. 

            The film also stars Kali Reis (Catch the Fair One, True Detective: Night Country, Resident Evil (2026)) as Chris’ partner Jaq, Annabelle Wallis (The Tudors, X-Men: First Class, Malignant) as Chris’ late wife Nicole Raven, Chris Sullivan (The Knick, This Is Us, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2) as Rob, Kylie Rogers (Yellowstone, Home Before Dark, Beau is Afraid) as Chris’ daughter Britt Raven, Kenneth Choi (Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Wolf of Wall Street, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story) as Ray Vale, Rafi Gavron (Breaking and Entering, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, A Star is Born (2018)) as Holt Charles, and Jeff Pierre (War Dogs, Beyond, Walker) as Patrick Burke. 

            Overall, Mercy isn’t a horrendous movie and there are glimmers of interesting ideas, but any potential this film has is wasted on cheap imitations of far superior sci-fi movies. It’s like a bad version of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report except replace Tom Cruise with Chris Pratt and psychics with AI, otherwise the plot is pretty much exactly the same. 

            It’s a bad film and it managed to fool me in what kind of bad it was, the first half is so awkward to the point of hilarity that it was giving me serious Ice Cube War of the Worlds vibes from Pratt’s performance and line deliveries early on and I’ve seen Pratt be very charismatic and endearing in other projects, but this film gave him zero favors. But then, it becomes a generic sci-fi movie in the second half that’s just dull bad and loses the unintentionally hilarious and stilted “Energy?” from before. 

            I will however give Rebecca Ferguson some credit as the Mercy program’s AI judge, she actually does play this part well and I mean that with all seriousness. The script is terrible, but she understood her performance and captured the stern, robotic personality of this computer program while still having a little fun with it from time to time. 

            This isn’t a screen-life movie like the Bekmambetov-produced Unfriended movies, Searching movies, or the 2025 War of the Worlds, but there are so many scenes involving computer desktop screens, smartphone videos, and computer files where I’m starting to question whether or not Timur Bekmambetov has a weird hard-on for computer screens. Maybe I just overthought this, but computer screens are becoming a new cliché in Timur Bekmambetov filmmaking. 

            Again, I don’t think Mercy is a godawful movie as I’ve seen much, much worse (The new Silent Hill movie that I reviewed recently was worse than this) and I do legitimately like Pratt and Ferguson. Sadly, this film starts off as an awkward, hysterical disaster and then turns into a huge pile of nothing that copies and pastes ideas from better sci-fi movies to the point where it stops being “So Bad It’s Good” and just becomes lazy and dull, the worst kind of bad if you ask me.