Chris Pratt's Sci-Fi Dystopia Is a Harebrained, Confounding Slice of Swiss Cheese

When Chris Pratt’s bumbling Mercy begins, it seems like director Timur Bekmambetov is going to make some valid, if low-hanging fruit points, about the surveillance state, government overreach and AI’s ballooning sphere of influence. But by the end of the film’s 100 or so confounding minutes, it has more or less endorsed AI, mostly because Bekmambetov and writer Marco van Belle clearly find all of this new technology kind of cool.

Mercy is not an uninteresting film. There is a lot of exciting, tactile action and the 3D is satisfyingly justified, but its neoconservative outlook on these burgeoning sociopolitical questions is bland, absurd, and exceedingly silly. Intriguingly, the film channels the haptic experience of virtual reality gaming, but it’s all in service of something trite, politically regressive and narratively boneheaded.

It is also difficult to watch a film where Chris Pratt sits strapped to a chair for nearly the entire runtime. Pratt apparently asked to literally be strapped when filming, which feels like a frat guy’s silly misconception of Daniel Day-Lewis-inspired method acting. Kudos to Pratt for trying so hard, but the effort is for naught, as the actor seems as out of place as ever. He’s done this to himself just to play the hilariously named Detective Chris Raven, a star of the LAPD who has been accused of murdering his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis), and now has only 90 court-mandated minutes to prove he’s innocent.

Timur Bekmambetov Ends Up Endorsing the Very Thing He Purports to Critique

The year is 2029, and Chris and Nicole have been early and public advocates for the Mercy Court, an AI-powered system that seems to act outside the traditional bounds of criminal justice. Alleged perpetrators of violent crime are locked into a mechanical chair and judged by an AI judge, in this trial, Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), who plays triple duty as adjudicator, all-encompassing lawyer and executioner, in the case of a guilty verdict. Ferguson is, unsurprisingly, exceptional as an advanced AI system, balancing human mimicry and robotic movement, in, ironically, the film’s only human element.

Honestly, the questions that arise alone around this system are juicy enough, but none of them are addressed. It’s difficult to grasp how this system would be approved, even in a dystopia of overwhelming AI-reliance. Actually, the most incredulous aspect of the story is the idea that the LAPD would agree to send a celebrated police officer to stand trial in a highly publicized, experimental court without going the extra mile to protect one of its own.

Chris wakes up in the chair, clearly hungover, in a rumpled, dirtied white button-up shirt, in a room that is occupied by no one except himself. There is not a single human overseeing the process, apparently, and he does not know how he got there or what he is accused of doing. Maddox plays him an advertisement for her own system, which seems odd, but nice to have the oncoming pile of exposition, I suppose. Even though the Mercy Court has only executed 18 people so far, its very existence is supposedly so powerful that it has reduced violent crime by 65% since its advent. Sure.

We are told that Los Angeles has adopted this system as a response to the uncontrollable amount of crime, which has also prompted the city to develop “red zones” where the massive unhoused community is shoveled into encampments next to drug dealers and murderers like some kind of open-aired prison. It feels like a FOX News deranged nightmare of a liberal city.

But the film isn’t about what’s happened to LA, it’s about what is happening to Chris, who seems genuinely shocked to find out his wife is dead. Maddox presents all manner of evidence that is damning: the detective is a relapsed drunk with rage issues in a loveless marriage that Nicole has tried to end with divorce. He has little to no relationship with his daughter, Britt (Kylie Rogers), and is experiencing guilt and PTSD from the loss of his partner (Kenneth Choi). He hasn’t been checking in with his sponsor, Robert (Chris Sullivan).

Even though there is Ring camera footage of Chris coming home to his wife and audio recordings of them having a violent argument in the twenty-minute timeframe in which she was murdered, Chris maintains he is innocent. In this Mercy Court system, proving one’s innocence is not done by the power of attorney but by the defendant alone, which is of course, highly unconstitutional and a gross violation of personal rights, but okay, sure, this is a world where a lot of that has been thrown out the window. But it does seem strange than in a world of militarized police and an even heavier arm of the judicial system than current day that Chris would be allowed to conduct raids through FaceTime with his partner, Jaq (Kali Reis), even though he stands trial for murder.

When the trial begins, Chris is told the probability of his guilty verdict is nearly 98%, and that in order to stay the execution he has to get it down to 92. This also requires some ignorance of pesky rationality, since (at least for now) we operate in a judicial system that insists on innocence before proven guilty, but again, sure, let’s just say that democracy has corroded so much to the point where many basic tenets have been formally reversed.

It’s difficult to come away from the film with any other understanding but that the filmmakers stand in full support of militarizing the police, crushing anti-government dissent and implementing AI and surveillance wherever it is possible.

The film is actually fairly fun once it gets into the meat of the investigation, but why the time limit of 90 minutes? And why, after Chris successfully introduces new evidence, is that time limit not changed? Mercy is frustrating because Bekmambetov, who made Profile and was a producer on the Unfriended films, is a real pioneer for desktop cinema, and in the small moments where the film works, it makes cinematic what has previously been static.

The process of searching through all manner of cloud-based applications and information in a video-game-like manner is a tantalizing prospect, one just wishes it wasn’t done for something so harebrained. Most ridiculous of all may be the film’s implication that it is actually possible to teach an AI system empathy. It’s difficult to come away from the film with any other understanding but that the filmmakers stand in full support of militarizing the police, crushing anti-government dissent and implementing AI and surveillance wherever it is possible, and though they’re entitled to their opinions, I’d rather not be strapped to a chair myself and forced to watch it play out.