Ticketworthy! - Mercy

Credit where credit is due, it isn’t easy to come up with a unique, interesting concept for a movie these days. In that regard, writer Marco Van Belle and director Timur Bekmambetov deserve some praise for their new crime thriller, Mercy. Unfortunately, the duo uses the setting in the most boring and predictable way possible, completely ruining any novelty the idea might have. It’s a real shame, because I think there’s a genuinely great movie in there somewhere, it just needs a much better plot.

As is, the plot we get follows Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) as he stands trial in the futuristic “Mercy” court. The court is overseen by an A.I. program named Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) who acts as judge, jury, and executioner in the courtroom. Raven is accused of murdering his wife and has 90 minutes to prove his innocence or he will be killed for the crime. Using the large, interconnected network of devices and cloud storage that Maddox has access to, he has to piece together what actually happened before his time runs out.

At times, this setting can really draw you in. Pratt also does a respectable job, he’s convincing and likeable enough to carry the plot essentially by himself. Raven is a surprisingly nuanced character who, due to his heavy drinking, doesn’t actually remember the events that led to his arrest. As such, though he claims his innocence, he can never be totally sure that he didn’t kill his wife. It’s a fairly complex role, and Pratt manages it well.

It’s in the actual use of the “Mercy” system where the film falls short. For a supposedly all-powerful A.I. that has access to every phone and camera in the city, it spends a huge chunk of the story just making phone calls for Raven. There are a few moments where it uses its resources to help the investigation in a unique way, but most of the time it’s just used to video call other characters so that they can do the actual snooping. There’s nothing wrong with the film doing a more traditional investigation, of course, but it does make you wonder what the point of the fancy A.I. really is.

On the subject of Maddox, there are entirely too many loose threads with the program that the movie never properly addresses. Sometimes she behaves like a computer, but other times she shorts out or seems to have actual human emotions like sympathy and fear. The film has no interest in exploring these changes, but it does feel like a plotline that was meant to be in the story and just wound up on the cutting room floor. I’d have liked to have known where it was going.

Missed opportunities ultimately define the entire film. The A.I. is mostly pointless, despite being a central part of the story. Chris Pratt turns in a solid performance but is given very little to actually do. The use of technology and surveillance to solve a murder is an interesting twist on the genre, but we spend way more time using it to watch other characters solve the crime the traditional way and the whole thing ends in a fistfight anyway. It all feels poorly planned. It’s like they had an idea for a movie but couldn’t be bothered to work out the details so they just slapped that idea on top of a generic thriller and called it a day. The film may be called Mercy, but the truly merciful thing to do would have been to take another pass at the script and make a film worthy of its premise.