Mercy Review: Guilty of Being Stupid

At a time when AI is being rammed into every aspect of our lives, we deserve a film that will deal with the real ethical and legal quandaries raised by letting LLMs into the courtroom. Instead, what we get is Mercy, a film so dull, doltish, and off-putting that it can only be described as Minority Report with CTE.

It’s an almost identical setup, with a cop on the wrong side of a supposedly infallible super-science legal system. The MERCY court is an AI-powered judge, jury, and executioner, with the virtual Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson, of the Dune and Mission: Impossible franchises) dispassionately handing down death sentences for the worst of the worst. Due process has been reduced to an algorithm, with the underlying presumption that anyone who makes it into its empty concrete box of a courtroom must be guilty. However, LAPD robbery/homicide cop Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) knows he didn’t actually murder his wife (Annabelle Wallis), even if all the footage that Maddox has in its system suggests otherwise – and he only has 90 minutes to prove his innocence.

We know he only has 90 minutes because there’s a literal countdown clock, and he’s strapped to a chair that is also the method of execution. So, cue an hour and a half of an immobile Chris Pratt voice-dialing people, lots of post-Blade Runner digital evidence manipulation, and car chases happening elsewhere. It’s like watching Chris Pratt trying to solve a PC point-and-click mystery.

This all transpires in a somewhat future-ish L.A. inspired by the San Francisco tech bros’ vision of the City of Angels as a hellscape filled with (gasps, clutches pearls) homeless people. They are, of course, all junkies and criminals. Exactly when this is supposed to happen seems unclear, since cops have personal helicopters in the back of their cars but a hard copy of The Anarchist Cookbook is also a pivotal plot point. Nothing makes sense, even as Raven and Maddox hand-hold the audience through the script, its obvious red herrings and predictable twists. Pratt at least realizes that he just needs to furrow his brow and that will suffice, but Ferguson foolishly tries some character development for Maddox, making its character erratic when it’s supposed to be linear.

What’s most astounding about Mercy is that this is the script that got greenlit. It’s 2026, and just about every screenwriter has an AI project in their back pocket, most of which will have a touch of contemporary resonance about them, but Marco van Belle’s script fell out of the Nineties. Delete, delete, delete.

Mercy could have salvaged at least a trace of watchability through the direction of Timur Bekmambetov. The Kazakh-Russian director proved with his career-opening salvo of Night Watch and Day Watch that he can gloss over a nonsensical script with style, while his screen-life drama Profile constructed drama through details. However, after the disaster of Ice Cube yelling on Skype that was War of the Worlds, it’s clear that promise has disappeared, as Bekmambetov and cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb flip between poorly crafted wide shots bereft of any tension and nausea-inducing body-cam footage – and, of course, Chris Pratt strapped to a chair, reacting to a green screen. If there’s one real lesson here, it’s that Pratt needs to be moving for his charisma to work its magic on audiences.

Maybe it’s not the body-cam footage that’s nauseating. Maybe it’s the whole setup, a premise that’s endlessly more reactionary than it seems to realize and delivered with such intellectual dishonesty and overwhelming incompetence that the ticking clock feels like a threat. Think you’re leaving soon? You’ve still got 75 minutes and 15 seconds, 14, 13, 12 … Seriously, audiences do not need another constant reminder that their lives are slipping away. Just watching Mercy will have them reconsidering their priorities.

This article appears in January 23 • 2026.