Joel on Film

To give Mercy some credit, Marco van Belle’s screenplay and director Timur Bekmambetov’s approach so thoroughly puts the pedal to the floor that the film rarely stops for breath. That’s impressive, given that a good 95 percent of the running time consists of watching star Chris Pratt, who has been fastened to a seat, watch the actual events of the movie take place. The concept here is intriguing but a little shortsighted: In the alarmingly near-future of 2029, the justice system has been replaced with an artificial intelligence that acts judge, jury and the other thing—a fact that, bizarrely, has been embraced by the public.

Never mind the fact that such a wide acceptance of this concept is essentially impossible to rationalize—and in a way that rather cuts the cable suspending our disbelief, for that matter. How those in power have implemented the system in question is also highly questionable in a way that renders the drama here both frenetic and useless: The accused, who must now prove their innocence after having been assumed guilty, is strapped to a chair that, once a timer runs out, will carry out the execution. Maybe some aspects of this process are kept from the public, but it’s also hard to imagine that this concept is at all acceptable.

The filmmakers, though, have already asked a lot of us by the time we hear about the pitch that led to the process becoming both practical and legal. Crime had gotten to the point that deaths in the line of duty for police officers were a weekly, then a daily, occurrence, and yes, it’s a little bleak that no systemic change was addressed until the police institutions were directly affected. Pratt’s Christopher Raven, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department and a fierce proponent of the new court system (called the Mercy Court, hence the title) following the death of his partner (played by Kenneth Choi), finds himself in the hot seat, if you’ll forgive the phrasing.

The plot here is quite familiar to anyone who might have seen a science-fiction thriller from a little more than two decades ago, except that van Belle has replaced the concept of pre-crime with artificially intelligent litigation. That obviously means Raven will be accused of a crime that he believes to have been impossible—in this case, the stabbing murder of his wife Nicole (a thoroughly wasted Annabelle Wallis) in a time frame that seemingly eliminates the possibility of outside involvement. The adjudicator is a “judge” known as Maddox, played with cool matter-of-factness by Rebecca Ferguson (better than material that doesn’t deserve her commitment), that quickly clarifies it can only consider the facts of the case, the programming already installed, and the limits of the 90-minute timer.

That timer, by the way, basically kills any sense of drama or tension that might arise from this scenario, as we quickly realize neither van Belle nor Bekmambetov is going to have the conviction or the bravery to take the scenario to any dark or unhappy places. The mystery here is a pretty basic one, and the steps to putting together the puzzle it creates are pretty standard-issue. Other suspects are either unmasked or ruled out, some piece of evidence is either prioritized or abandoned, and around in a circle the movie goes until the actual culprit is found.

The climax, meanwhile, is a chaotic and undisciplined mess of twists and turns and revelations that all add up to just a bunch of stuff happening because it can, with no thought afforded to whether any of it actually makes sense or fits together as a puzzle. Only the central gimmick, then, of a full-fledged investigation whittled down to an hour and a half (both in our time and, until a final few minutes that must inevitably leave the new-fangled courtroom, the movie’s), exists to set Mercy apart from contemporary murder-mystery action-thrillers, and that’s borderline.

Rating: *½ (out of ****)