Mercy (2026)
What is it with January and screen-contained movies? It’s almost a trope to have someone watching everything unfold from behind a screen, and Mercy is no different. It takes place almost in real time and I guess it could be a lot worse.
Chris Raven has had a lot on his plate lately. He’s helped develop Maddox, a super-sensitive AI judge that takes all the hassle out of court appearances and bureaucracy. Heck, it even shortens the appeals process to, well, nothing and precludes housing the guilty in prison. Chris is very proud of his pet project and thinks he’s changed the world.
It all seems great until Chris is accused of murdering his wife, Nicole and finds himself in the hot seat. If he doesn’t prove his innocence in ninety minutes, Maddox will give him a lethal injection.
Chris knows he’s innocent, and in the process of going through all his personal files to prove his innocence, he stumbles on the real murderer, and the problem is that he has to stay in the chair the whole time if he wants to maintain the feed between he and his team of detectives, who he can see through the surveillance photo. The countdown continues, and so does the possibility of lethal injection.
And oh yeah, his daughter’s been kidnapped by Chris’s fellow AA member, who’s going on a rampage through the city with a big rig that’s got explosives set to go off. Just in case things aren’t crazy enough, right?
And through it all, the clock ticks down, reminding us that time is fleeting, as if we need reminders.
Golly, I know this is just a movie, but the ethics problems are Legion. No trial by jury, no counsel, no appeals process, and heaven forbid Maddox ever glitches out. Then there’s the fact that everyone’s under surveillance all the time, even in their own homes. Mercy is a lot like Minority Report except that that movie was better and at least the accused get a semblance of a trial, albeit a dystopian kangaroo court trial.
The missed opportunities and tonal mishaps are Legion as well. Maddox is supposed to be an AI judge whose only job is to try, convict, and execute, yet when Chris starts uncovering the facts of his wife’s murder, he’s able to interact with and somewhat affect what’s going on with the police investigation, and when that big rig comes careening down the street and crashing into everything in its path, suddenly Chris is down in it and can see it all around him, as if Maddox has morphed into a VR machine.
Sorry, but that’s goofy. Maddox is going a little bit outside her stated purpose. At least the acting isn’t bad, although I’m not sure how Ferguson and Pratt managed to keep such straight faces, given the absurdity of it all.
Mercy tries hard. It tries really, really hard. The problem is that it can’t decide what it wants to be, really. In its favor, though, that clock helpfully ticks down the minutes for the whole movie, letting us know how much longer we have until the ending credits.
Mercy is currently in theaters. Rated PG-13.
My grade: C
Principal Cast: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan, Kylie Rogers, Jeff Pierre, Rafi Gavron, Kenneth Choi, Jamie McBride, Ross Gosla, Mark Daneri, Hadyn Dalton, Noah Fearnley, Konstantin Podprugin, Cully Pratt, Philicia Saunders, Jay Jackson
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov.
Written by Marco van Belle.