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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