Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy spares some thought for the big questions of privacy, policing, and A.I. in the age of the digital panopticon. But more than anything, this twisty dystopian thriller commits to the jittery anxiety of doomscrolling. The film consists almost entirely of screens within screens within an IMAX 3D screen: floating desktop windows with translucent tastefully rounded iOS-style borders, opened, stacked, minimized and frantically zipped all over the place on a cavernous holographic display. All of it is set beneath a literal ticking clock counting down 90 minutes in real time, with a rising and falling percentage meter that will decide whether Chris Pratt’s brain is zapped to a paste even finer than his jawline.
In the very near future, soaring crime rates and budget cuts have prompted Los Angeles to invest in a new form of criminal justice: the oh-so-ironically-named Mercy Program, an A.I. whose access to state, private, and public records allows it to process and sentence accused capital offenders in record time. The program acts, as its PR video gleefully exclaims, as “judge, jury, and executioner!” in a system where the accused are “guilty until proven innocent!”
Strapped to an electric chair in an empty chamber, defendants are granted what amounts to a 90-minute ChatGPT session with Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), L.A.’s implacable, inexplicably Swedish-accented A.I. avatar of justice, with the full expanse of her data-diving capabilities at their disposal to try and prove their innocence. If they can reduce their guilt threshold into the reasonable doubt zone (beneath 92%) within the arbitrary time limit, then they’re free to go, but if not, their brains are sizzled to the sweet hereafter.
So it is that Detective Chris Raven (Pratt), once a leading advocate of the Mercy Program, one day finds himself in the hot seat after his wife (Annabelle Wallis) turns up murdered in their kitchen. Raven isn’t in a good way, and we know this because Pratt wears a slightly ruffled white shirt and a messy five o’clock shadow. He’s so hungover that he can’t even remember what he was doing when the murder occurred. As Maddox pulls up scores of personal info—Raven’s entire digital life, his co-workers’ public videos, his family’s private text exchanges and appearances in surveillance footage, his teenage daughter’s (Kylie Rogers) Instagram burner account—we learn that he’s struggling with alcoholism, PTSD, and anger issues.
Things already look grim for Raven with well over an hour on the clock, but the audience knows from Pratt’s big, moist blueberry eyes and eternal Boy Scout demeanor that he just couldn’t have done the horrible things they say. So we strap in as he sets out to prove his detective bona fides at gunpoint by investigating his friends, family, and coworkers, diving headlong into L.A.’s municipal data cloud in search of a way out. Through multiple game-changing revelations, he debates the difference between “facts” and “truth” with the A.I., at one point short-circuiting it in wonderment at the concept of the “hunch”—the real basis of law enforcement.
Bekmambetov, producer of last year’s industry-laughingstock War of the Worlds reboot starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, is unlikely to escape allegations of trailing in the decades-old footsteps of Steven Spielberg. But the so-called screenlife style that he’s spent years cultivating with various collaborators yields strangely compelling results when blown up to Avatar-like proportions and propulsively scored by Ramin Djawadi, even if a questionably cast Pratt’s performance and Marco van Belle’s script aren’t huge on emotional depth.
Icons and windows hover and whiz as Raven composites records, makes connections, and pursues leads; intense chase sequences play out in grainy camera-in-camera feeds across multiple diegetic sources as Raven corresponds with his cop colleagues, watching from his holographic-monitor-packed trial chamber. He’s both helpless in his physical constraints and nigh-omniscient in the A.I.-assisted sleuthing power at his fingertips, responding to and directing the physical world from his place in the digital. He’s almost like one of the characters that Jimmy Stewart played for Hitchcock transplanted into a post-cyberpunk world.
As Raven races to comb the head-spinning seas of data looking for clues to solve the mystery, discussion turns not only to the disturbing volume of personal info made publicly accessible to motivated snoops (or algorithms), but to the truths that data alone can’t reveal, or that can hide in incomplete pictures—sometimes literally. Not every aspect holds up to scrutiny, but the film is a decently tense bit of future-shock schlock, formally attuned to the chatbot-consulting, database-gorging, digitally-drunk ethos of the moment, and worth catching in its maximalist theatrical format while the opportunity presents itself.
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