THE STORY – In the near future, an advanced AI judge tells a captive detective that he’s on trial for the murder of his wife. If he fails to prove his innocence within 90 minutes, he’ll be executed on the spot.
THE CAST – Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan & Kylie Rogers
THE TEAM – Timur Bekmambetov (Director) & Marco van Belle (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
If any living director can claim to understand how to film modern lives, mostly lived online, it’s Timur Bekmambetov. While Bekmambetov has shepherded the likes of “Unfriended” and “Searching” to the big screen as a producer, his only directorial credit in the “screenlife” genre he helped popularize was the queasy-making thriller “Profile” until now. His latest film, “Mercy,” takes the screelife genre and explodes it, moving from one screen to multiple screens as an LA police detective (Chris Pratt) finds himself in a courtroom powered by an AI judge (Rebecca Ferguson) where he has 90 minutes and access to the city’s municipal wireless grid to prove he’s innocent of the crime of killing his wife. While the story technically never leaves the courtroom, we see crime scene walkthroughs and reenactments, security camera footage, social media posts, live video feeds, and more surrounding our protagonist as he desperately attempts to make sense of it all in real time (more or less).
Bekmambetov has always prized style over substance, and while “Mercy” is no different, this is the first time his overbearing style feels like it’s trying to make up for the fact that there isn’t much substance in the screenplay worth caring about. Desperate for the film to be seen as cool, Bekmambetov does everything he can to get the audience worked up, throwing screen after screen of videos, photos, and documents at them as Ramin Djawadi’s propulsive score ramps up, tricking the audience into thinking they’re watching a thrilling action scene despite nothing actually happening. It looks as slick as can be, with sleek design and bleeding-edge effects that flesh out a techno-fascist future that feels frighteningly possible. Frustratingly, Marco van Belle’s screenplay does nothing with the fascinating ideas at play in his high-concept, undercutting his own world-building by turning it into sci-fi window dressing for a rote, unimaginative, ultimately offensive murder mystery. It’s pretty eye-catching window dressing, to be sure. Still, the film’s conception of AI is so laser-focused on using it only as a high-speed data warehouse, call center, and referee that there’s no space available for the larger implications of a fully AI legal system.
What makes this even more frustrating is that Ferguson is such perfect casting for an AI judge, and she gives a performance as fascinating as you’d imagine. Fully in control of every tool at her disposal, the actress uses her Sphinx-like features to tantalizingly keep giving Judge Maddox (why does the AI judge even have a name? Who knows!) hints of a real personality, tilting her head just so and modulating her voice to get a response out of people. She even perfectly captures the program glitching in one fun sequence. While the screenplay makes a big show of Maddox glitching after Raven points out some inconsistencies in her behavior, though, it ultimately doesn’t do anything with that; Maddox hasn’t been corrupted, nor is she growing more human as a result of all she’s seen. Her purpose and abilities are so vaguely defined that it’s not even clear when or even if she’s deviating from her programming. In fact, the presentation of the Mercy Court, in general, feels so vague that it didn’t make much sense. The opening exposition explains what led to the Mercy Court and how it works, but leaps in logic abound. Defendants get absolutely zero legal help but access to every phone and camera in the whole city, not to mention private company computer networks? And what role is law enforcement supposed to play? Is one sweep of a crime scene and evidence really enough to meet any national legal standard? Maddox repeatedly insists that she can only deal in facts and logic, since her programming lacks anything comparable to human intuition. In this way, Raven is incredibly lucky that he’s a cop, as he has access to teams on the ground who can investigate for him (even if they have to speedrun it given the limited time of the trial) that most people wouldn’t have, not to mention years of on-the-job experience to process all this information and come to conclusions a computer program never could.
But let’s put the logistical issues with the Mercy Court aside for now, because we’ll be here all day otherwise. Ultimately, your enjoyment of “Mercy” depends on how much you’re willing to set that aside and how much you can enjoy Bekmambetov’s slick near-future style. There’s certainly entertainment value in “Mercy,” especially in a late-film chase captured largely via dashcam, and in the film’s gamified version of criminal court, which has a video-game-like appeal. But with a concept so close to the real world, you need to engage with the ideas to connect with the audience beyond the surface, truly. Unlike an ideal justice system, “Mercy” doesn’t delve deeper than the surface, a discredit to both the people who made it, who are capable of better, and the audience, who deserve better.
