Prime Time: Mercy (2026)

The film may be called Mercy, but the easiest way to let you know my opinion on it is to clarify that no mercy is shown to any viewers who manage to sit through this absolute dross. I've seen some movie mis-steps, and I've already sat through more films trying to make AI a main plot element than I ever wanted to, but this is easily one of the worst star vehicles I've seen in quite some time.

Set in the near future, Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up to find himself in the Mercy court. He's a detective, but he's accused of murdering his wife. All of the evidence points to him doing it, but the AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) still allows him 90 minutes "trial" to attempt to prove enough reasonable doubt. The clock is ticking. Chris cannot move, but he can access all of the phones and recordings available to the AI system, and he can try to maintain communication with his partner (Kali Reis), his sponsor (Chris Sullivan), and his daughter (Kylie Rogers) while following the slimmest of leads that he hopes will lead to proving his innocence.

It looks as if director Timur Bekmambetov, once an interesting and impressive talent, has been seduced by the dark side. Translation = he seems to have become obsessed with films about tech or plots that can be played out in the "screenlife" form. I won't blame him entirely for this mess though. The majority of the blame needs to be put at the feet of writer Marco van Belle. This is only his second produced screenplay, the first belonging to a film that he also directed back in 2015, but I already believe that people should do their utmost to stop him from writing a third. 

It would be bad enough if it just went through the standard motions of an unimaginative thriller, lacking any proper tension and almost entirely predictable from the first minute to the last. It gets so much worse though. Van Belle seems to have lost focus of his own writing, and instead decided to throw in awful dialogue and clichés that make no sense in the context established onscreen. That's the only explanation I can think of for a film that turns a knowledgeable and smart AI entity into something more akin to an alien or clumsy robot learning about the human race. I wasn't exactly invested in the thing at any point, but I struggled to keep myself from checking out entirely when Pratt says that he's working on a hunch and Ferguson has to keep a straight face while asking "what is a hunch?". I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour that I stood up and yelled "you're an AI entity, you can just find out the definition of what a hunch is in a fraction of a second!" before slamming my face repeatedly into the nearest wall. And that's before the unfeeling and impartial judge starts becoming surprisingly . . . partial, working hard to help our hero get the answers that he needs before the timer runs out/film ends.

It was always going to be difficult to impress people with a film that required Pratt to be the emotional character and Ferguson to be an impassive avatar, and the end result plays out as expected. Both are miscast, and both suffer, but it's Pratt who does more to unbalance the whole film, unconvincing for almost every minute that he's onscreen (and, sadly, he's onscreen for the majority of the runtime). A few supporting cast members do better, but that's not hard.

I'm not sure how much it cost to make Mercy, online sources put it at about $60M, but I can guarantee you that giving that money to ten different film-makers could have given us ten much more interesting slices of science fiction. And any of them might have featured a leading man capable of some proper emoting.

2/10

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Silent Night (2021)

If there's one thing we Brits can do it's exploit our civility and manners for entertainment purposes. And we have used that for many different movies, from classic murder mysteries to dark comedies, from the sci-fi horror of something like Prey (Norman J. Warren, 1977) to the unfolding dinner party with a big secret in Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948). This material has been mined by many other countries throughout the decades of cinema, but I like to think that they all stem from observations of British people in their home environment.

Silent Night, the first feature from writer-director Camille Griffin (who also casts all three of her sons in roles of varying importance), shows a group of seemingly well-to-do British people gathering at an isolated home for an evening of dining, drinking, conversation, and probably more drinking. It's a dinner party with a difference, that difference being the looming end of the world. 

While this is an interesting premise for a movie, and could have been a showpiece for any actor, Griffin stumbles due to a lack of tonal focus or consistency. She may have wanted to make something that weaves from comedy to drama to horror, but every one of the better moments just makes you wonder how many other ways the film could have played out in a much more satisfying way.

The main fault lies with Griffin’s script, especially when she doesn’t give anyone the kind of razor-sharp dialogue that the film craves. None of the main characters have the steel required to lift it up to a level of greatness. If this had been made fifty years ago with a main role for Bette Davis, THEN you have something closer to greatness.

Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode are the host couple, both doing well with what they are given (mainly being polite and attempting to put a brave face on things), and their three children (the characters played by Griffin’s children) include another star turn from Roman Griffin Davis, playing the most important person in the film. Lucy Punch, Annabelle Wallis, Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Lily-Rose Depp play the women, all with various approaches to their impending fates, and Sope Dirisu and Rufus Jones are the two male guests, supporting their partners as they deal with some unfinished business.

Things step up a notch in the third act, and the very end features a great little “punchline”, but the end result is more of an interesting, incomplete, almost-ran than an outright winner.

6/10

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Malignant (2021)

There are some things to consider about the conversations people have been having about Malignant, the latest horror movie from James Wan. First of all, the fact that it is a very divisive film isn’t necessarily a negative. Whether you end up loving or hating this, kudos to Wan for taking such a huge swing with it. Secondly, someone having a different opinion of it does not mean they didn’t “get it”, even if the film has a lot in there that will be recognised mainly by older horror fans who are more likely to spot the many influences, from giallo to grindhouse films. Third, you can enjoy a movie without loving absolutely everything it does. Despite what the internet may be telling us, reactions still do not have to be absolutely weighted to one end or the other.

Now we can get to the film itself. Annabelle Wallis plays Madison Mitchell, a woman who starts to experience visions of violent murders. Knowing a bit too much, and the victim of an attack herself, the police start to consider Madison as a suspect, especially when it turns out that she has connections to the victims. Does this mean that Madison’s childhood friend, a presence nobody else would ever see, has reappeared?

Although it’s not just Wallis onscreen, with supporting turns from Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White, it’s a film that stays so focused on her character, and people are asked to act in a certain way, most of the cast are secondary to the vision of Wan. Simply there to be puppeteered, ironically. It’s hard to judge people for performances that have been directed in a very specific way. Although Marina Mazepa deserves a special mention for her outstanding physical performance.

The script, written by Akela Cooper (from a story thrashed out in conjunction with Wan and Ingrid Bisu), is pretty terrible. It’s the combination of bad writing and weak acting that has led to so many people saying that Wan has delivered a wild American giallo, but that claim forgives a lot of mis-steps. There’s no style here good enough to feel faithful to the giallo flicks it wants to emulate, a lot of it overshadowed by horribly unnecessary CGI, and the bonkers ending is disappointingly telegraphed from the earliest scenes (and giallo fans will know that most of the maddest endings they have enjoyed have been anything but predictable).

As inevitable as the final act is, it is also where Wan pulls out all of the stops and presents an audaciously fun sequence that makes the whole film worth your time. Perhaps that is a sign that he is more at home wallowing in gore and carnage than trying to be stylish and homaging giallo flicks, but it certainly allows him to provide nods, some bigger than others, to the works of Frank Henenlotter, Stephen King, Brian De Palma, and his good friend, Leigh Whannell. I don’t mind this pick ‘n’ mix approach when the end result is such a hoot, and nobody will feel bored by the time the end credits roll.

Malignant is good, sometimes really good, but the first hour or so isn’t. You have some disappointingly weak death scenes, characters it is hard to really care about, a score from Joseph Bishara that doesn’t really work alongside the visuals most of the time, and constant overuse of CGI when practical effects would have added to the overall feel that Wan was aiming for. That final act makes up for a multitude of small sins, however, and how far it pushes the envelope towards real cinematic insanity makes it one of the strangest horrors to be pushed into the mainstream in a very long time. Which makes it worth your time and support.

7/10

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Tag (2018)

Based on a true story, to a degree, Tag is a comedy all about a group of friends who have tried to stay young at heart by competing in an ongoing game of, as you may have guessed, Tag. It happens every year, throughout the month of May. That last one who is tagged as "it" is the person who has to spend a whole year knowing that they were the loser. One member of the team (Jerry, played by Jeremy Renner) has never been tagged, but this is the year when that changes. It's also the year of his wedding.

Marking the feature directorial debut of Jeff Tomsic,  Tag is about as middling as mainstream comedies get. I'm not going to deny that I laughed a few times, which is a few times more than I expected to, but a lot of the humour here comes from the cast, who elevate the fairly weak script by Rob McKittrick and Mark Steilen.

Renner is a lot of fun here, his ultra-serious approach to covering all of the bases to avoid being tagged a highlight of the film, and the rest of the team do well. Ed Helms is the one who seems to have things planned out best, Jon Hamm looks to be a viable threat at times, Jake Johnson is in unfocused stoner mode, and Hannibal Buress amuses with a number of timely, but unhelpful, observations. Isla Fisher is very good, playing the wife of the character played by Helms, her intensity turned all the way up to 11 for many of her scenes, Leslie Bibb isn't bad as the bride-to-be, and Annabelle Wallis follows the group to get an unexpected story for her newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. Rashida Jones is always a welcome presence, but she's shoehorned in here as a distraction for two of the main male characters, and subsequently given nothing decent to work with.

I'm surprised that we don't get a selection of upbeat pop hits but, otherwise, this ticks all of the expected boxes. You get flashbacks to the characters playing the game as kids, you get a number of tag-related set-pieces, there are some underhand tactics, and you also get a secret revealed towards the back end that is supposed to underline everything with some additional emotion and poignancy (although it doesn't). Fisher aside, the women onscreen are mostly sidelined by the men running after one another and being big kids, and it's all presented as a wonderful way in which friends stay bonded over the years and hang on to their youth.

It's a shame that this is so mediocre throughout, but then it's also hard to see how it could have been anything more than that. How, after all, do you flesh out a film that is based around such a silly, and lightweight, concept? Maybe you decide that it's not really film-worthy and move on to something better instead.

Some may, of course, like this more than I did. Many may liked it even less. Aside from the lack of major laughs, I just found myself often watching the carnage onscreen and wondering just why these people were being celebrated for being selfish men-babies who didn't care about the damage they were causing to bystanders and property as they raced to tag one another. That may just be a sign that I am now officially middle-aged. Or it MAY be that these characters aren't really worthy of a whole movie.

5/10

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Bonus Review: Annabelle (2014)

A horror spin-off from The Conjuring, this is a film that shows just how easy it can be to put together a polished final product without it feeling too obviously designed for the masses, even though it IS. I didn't love The Conjuring, but I did enjoy aspects of it. Annabelle is absolutely on a par with that film, although I was perhaps a little more receptive to it because of going in with lower expectations. There are less scares here, but those that are here are executed as perfectly as you could wish them to be.

For those who didn't see The Conjuring, Annabelle was a periphary character/prop used to show just what the main characters - the Warrens - had to do in their battles against evil forces. The start of this movie reprises those moments from The Conjuring, before moving backwards in time to show viewers the origin of the malevolent power that came to be contained within the doll. Well, that's the rough idea. What happens, instead, is that the audience is given another modern horror movie that replaces ghosts with demons before hitting many similar beats to the grand horrors of the late 1970s. Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton play the young couple, Mian and John, who end up with a doll in their home who appears to be far from lifeless, and it's not long until they start freaking out (understandably). A priest (Tony Amendola) may be able to help them out, but it all depends on just how powerful the evil is.

While not directly comparable to films such as The Omen, The Amityville Horror and The Sentinel, this is very much the territory that Annabelle traverses. The main characters are fairly mature adults, the potential ridiculousness of the whole thing is overlooked in favour of brow-furrowing and serious talk about real good and evil, and the glossiness of the whole thing still allows for moments of real darkness (literally, in the case of one nail-biting sequence).

Director John R. Leonetti certainly takes a more serious approach to the material than he did when directing The Butterfly Effect 2. It looks like his years of working as Director Of Photography for James Wan have paid off, and this is never more apparent than in those precisely-engineered jump scares. The script by Gary Dauberman may be weak, with fairly uninteresting characters and a surprising lack of focus, but it does enough to keep you interested in between the more memorable set-pieces.

Wallis, Horton and Amendola all do okay, but after the end credits roll it's only Annabelle who will linger in your mind. That's as it should be, obviously. It is, after all, "her" film. It's just a shame that none of the actual human characters stood out at all, although Alfre Woodard tries the hardest (playing Evelyn, a woman who becomes concerned for the couple as she sees what they're going through).

If I call the film competent then you may think I'm damning it with faint praise, but I don't mean to. It IS competent, which means that I tentatively recommend it to fans of mainstream horror movies like all of those mentioned above. As for the hardcore horror fans who sneer at anything made in America, with any kind of decent budget and studio backing, they can either give it a chance or not. They might just end up agreeing with me that it's . . . . . . competent.

6/10

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