Directed by Timur Bekmambetov | Written by Marco van Belle | ▲ | in Cinemas
It’s not often a movie makes me angry. I love cinema, so even the worst, most poorly made piece of crap usually offers something for me to enjoy. Mercy, which wants to be a gritty, adrenalized crime thriller cum science fiction picture, offers precious little. This is an insulting, waste of everyone’s time, a movie made by people who have contempt for the intelligence of their audience.
Yeah, it made me really angry.
What we have here is a mash-up of genres: Chris Pratt is Chris Raven, an alcoholic police detective in a near future Los Angeles where crime is rampant — whole areas have been zoned off due to violence and homeless encampments. The set-up offers some promise if this movie had a thought in its head.
In order to get the judicial system moving in the face of all this crime, they’ve changed the rules: People are guilty unless proven innocent. This is the Mercy Capital Court, run by an AI judge, Maddox, played by Rebecca Ferguson, whose gift for hiding her embarrassment being in this movie is maybe the one positive thing that can recommend this miserable experience.
She has access to all of the accumulated digital data of Los Angelenos in the municipal cloud — privacy is clearly a thing of the past — and if you’re in the dock with her, you have 90 minutes to convince her you’re innocent. She conveniently provides instant information you need to represent yourself, but she’ll be your judge, jury, and executioner, based on the available facts.
That’s where Chris Raven finds himself, strapped to a chair talking to a computer.
Yeah, I guess this also qualifies as a screenlife feature, with about half the smarts the genre entries usually provide, and it never makes the central dynamic — a dude strapped to a chair talking to a face, who shows him a bunch of images on multiple screens — anything close to interesting.
Maddox has already assembled a case against him. His wife (Annabelle Wallis) has been stabbed to death in their home and he’s the prime suspect. Every surveillance cam available has him at the scene, her blood on his clothes. Once he gathers his emotions, he admits he’s been a perennial asshole to his wife. In texts she says he’s been angry with her 57 different times. Statistically, that means he did it. At this point, we wish he’d just confess.
But no. He gets the the AI judge to phone his pals (including his AA sponsor, played by Chris Sullivan) other cops (including one played by Kali Reis, who is better than this material — everyone in this is better than this material, even the miscast lead, Chris Pratt). He starts piecing together his defense, that he didn’t kill his wife, trying to convince the judge with the timer counting down from 90 minutes.
This isn’t the kind of movie that seeds anything, other than the obviousness of who’s the murderer. There’s no mystery here, just a whole lot of jumping around from location to location, all virtually — there’s absolutely no point in seeing this in 3D IMAX, like I did, unless you think it’s cool to see hyperactive heads-up-displays.
The filmmakers fail to understand that not having your thriller protagonist able to hunt down his clues himself — and instead giving him a computer to do his work for him — isn’t suspenseful in any way. If he’d broken out of this holding cell, with the computer judge riding shotgun in his head, we might’ve had something.
Then there’s a script that has characters say exactly what’s required of them at just the right moment in order for the plot to advance — whether it’s at all sensible or not. There’s an occasional effect that could be eye-catching — large drones that carry law enforcement over the city — but the movie is too busy chasing its stupid plot to offer anything visually impressive.
And, at the end, what is it really about? Is it about people who make flawed computer programs that we shouldn’t trust, even if they have the capacity to learn? Who can say? A better question: who cares? I was begging for death walking out of Mercy.
