Mercy: Chris Pratt Fronts a High-Tech Thriller with Low-Tech Results
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B
What exactly is Mercy? A courtroom drama without the courtroom, the lawyers, or the jury? A futuristic action film featuring precisely one flying vehicle orbiting the sky like an oversized fidget spinner?
A cop drama told in semi-real time, complete with a countdown clock and 90 minutes to crack the case?The short answer is yes. It’s all of those things—and so much less.
Directed and produced by Timur Bekmambetov, Mercy wants to sell us on unity between artificial intelligence and human beings, even as it keeps the audience at arm’s length, spectators to a collaboration we’re never quite invited into. The film is amusing, occasionally clever, and perfectly serviceable as a distraction, but it never quite becomes the reinvention of the action film it seems to think it is.
Chris Pratt is facing an AI-based legal system in Mercy.
In a bit of casting that’s either against type or aggressively on it—depending on how charitable you’re feeling—Rebecca Ferguson plays the A.I., while Chris Pratt steps in to represent the human side of the equation. Pratt has become the go-to actor for movies that require either extensive A.I. interfaces or the sustained illusion that he’s reacting to something that isn’t actually there.
To be fair, he’s almost always the best part of whatever movie he’s in (Guardians of the Galaxy excepted, if only because he’s surrounded by people who won’t let him coast).
Ferguson, meanwhile, is saddled with the emotionally flattened performance that comes with playing a sentient system with a design flaw that excludes nuances. She’s an A.I. judge who deals strictly in facts, with the grey areas where truth tends to live deemed irrelevant to her programming. It’s a chilly, disciplined turn—something like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, though with forced smiles and considerably more data streams.
The film flirts with the morality of technology stepping in to make life more efficient: a one-stop A.I. judicial system that investigates, weighs evidence, and delivers verdicts without emotional interference or compassion. The system proudly insists it’s never wrong, a claim that sounds like a tagline for the original Westworld movie.
In the film’s central irony, Detective Chris Raven (Pratt), a vocal supporter of the mechanized system, finds himself accused of murdering his wife, and is now fighting for his life against the flawed and unflinching system he so wholeheartedly put into place. All facts point to him. If found guilty, he’s executed on the spot. He has 90 minutes to prove his innocence.
Raven becomes, quite literally, an armchair detective—piecing things together through smartphones, TikTok videos, text messages, and footage from a neighbour’s bird-watch camera. Helping him are fellow officer Jacqueline “Jack” Diallo (Kali Reis), Raven’s daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers), and his friend Rob (Chris Sullivan), who also happens to be his AA sponsor.
Visually, the film looks like having every app on your laptop open at once. The screen fractures into boxes, sidebars, floating text, surveillance windows, and screens within screens. It’s busy—sometimes engagingly so, sometimes in a way that feels like motion standing in for momentum.
It’s shot in 3D, an effect that has not really evolved since its debut in the ‘50s, other than offering depth rather than startling the audience with flying debris.
At heart, Mercy is a mystery, though not the cozy, audience-participation kind. This is an action mystery, where clues are thrown rather than considered. Revelations arrive quickly; some land, others don’t. The mystery itself is largely solvable within the first half hour, assuming you’re paying attention and not distracted by the film’s insistence on showing you absolutely everything, all the time.
But that turns out not to be the point. Mercy isn’t really about what happened. It’s about watching the machinery of justice, technology, and human instinct grind through a process already in motion.
In that sense, watching Mercy feels a bit like observing a large computer executing a program written by someone else: efficient, occasionally impressive, mildly redundant, and oddly compelling—even when you’re fairly sure you already know the answer.
Mercy. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson. In theatres January 23.