‘Mercy’ Review: This Movie About Chris Pratt Sitting in a Chair Is the Platonic Ideal of a January Release

"Minority Report" but dumb, this screenlife thriller about a cop who has 90 minutes to prove himself innocent of murder to an AI judge isn't terrible, but you can tell everyone's putting half effort in.

In the long, proud history of January major releases, few films have such intense January energy as “Mercy.” Traditionally a dumping ground for films studios have no belief in, the first month of the year occasionally offers up films that stand out, whether due to memeability, genuine quality, or sheer rancid awfulness. And then there’s something like “Mercy,” which isn’t so much a bad film as it is a film that barely feels like it even exists, a vapid sci-fi thriller that’s competent and forgettable enough that, 20 years ago, it could have had a long life as scheduling filler on basic cable.

In other words, it’s the exact kind of movie that’s perfect to release in January, when general audiences are reluctant to face cold weather for a movie date, and cinephiles are more concerned with catching the late releases and award contenders they missed from the year before. In any other month, a thriller where Chris Pratt sits in a chair for 90 minutes would get largely overlooked. But in January, it has a very real chance of being the starriest new release on offer — or, rather, it would be in an average January that doesn’t have a “28 Years Later” sequel out right now to watch instead.

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov (the filmmaker who has produced basically every notable screenlife film made since 2015, including “Unfriended,” “Searching,” and “Profile”), “Mercy” plunges us into a lightly futuristic Los Angeles that resembles a dumber, less evocative version of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days.” Some vague allusions to civilian unrest and goofy-looking flying police scooters aside, the main way the LA of 2029 differs from the LA of 2026 seems to be the existence of the titular Mercy system, a virtual court ruled over by AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson, sporting a steely gaze and a rather tragic slicked-back bob).

In this court, the accused — as a pre-trial intro helpfully informs us, invariably people who have committed the worst of crimes, mostly murder — have 90 minutes to use the Mercy system’s records to prove their innocence. Or at least, get close enough to it; the algorithm calculates the likelihood of guilt for the defendant, with a 92.5 percent percent probability serving as the threshold between walking away or getting a lethal injection from the high-tech chair in which this simulation is taking place.

Shaky world-building aside, there’s real potential to this set-up, something that recalls “Minority Report” in how it portrays the ethics of offloading the responsibilities of law and order to forces beyond normal humanity, but updated for an age of generative AI where something like Maddox really doesn’t seem that far removed from coming to fruition. Also like “Minority Report,” “Mercy” gets maximum dramatic irony out of having the main victim of this faulty system in the narrative be someone who once enforced it: Chris Pratt’s police detective Raven, who once advocated for Mercy only to wake up drunk in the chair as the film begins to learn he is the prime suspect for the murder of his estranged wife (Annabelle Wallis), and must now struggle for his life in the court he helped create.

Unlike a modern sci-fi masterpiece like “Minority Report,” “Mercy” has near-zero ambition beyond offering network TV-level thrills across a somehow too-long 100 minutes (frustratingly, this movie doesn’t quite commit as hard to the 90-minute time window it sets as much as it should), with the gimmick that it all takes place on a VR screen. While Raven is strapped to the chair, the Mercy system offers him basically all of the city at his fingertips: the Los Angeles of the future is a casually Orwellian state in which every phone and laptop in the city is connected to the Mercy system, allowing defendants to call up friends, investigate social media posts, and dig through security cameras to find leads.

It’s not a particularly intriguing or gripping mystery to watch be solved on screen. The pacing is fatally off — it takes a good 30 minutes of exposition and crying from Raven’s part before he actually commits to solving the crime, with the film trying to create some tension around the possibility that he may actually have done it, but drank off the memory that’s too obvious to see through. As a matter of fact, with the very limited number of suspects the film offers, it’s extremely easy to figure out who did it about an hour before Raven does — and when the third act revelations do hit, it’s less satisfying than it is exasperating, due to the introduction of a couple dozen thinly sketched plot points to tie it all together.

You’re not really ever necessarily rooting for Raven to find justice either: his personal story is a thin collection of clichés, from trauma over a dead partner, an alcohol problem he’s been battling, marital troubles he couldn’t heal from, and a bratty teen daughter (Kylie Rogers) he’s struggling to connect with. Pratt, a performer who has never really shone in straightforward po-faced action, seems a bit lost in the character, unsure whether to play him as a jerk or a misunderstood dad with a heart of gold, and Marco Van Belle’s paint-by-numbers script doesn’t give him many levels to play beyond “angry at Maddox” and “sad about his wife and/or daughter.”

Bekmambetov has produced plenty of screenlife mysteries such as “Searching” or “Missing,” but the film “Mercy” most recalls aren’t those but his most infamous project, last year’s reviled “War of the Worlds” remake starring Ice Cube. Like that film, “Mercy” mixes the basic tenets of the screenlife genre — in how it mimics the endless flow of information a computer screen offers — with sci-fi action. But while “War of the Worlds,” directed by Rich Lee, was a mess of baffling editing, special effects, and filmmaking choices you couldn’t look away from, “Mercy” is slickly made without ever being particularly exciting.

Bekmambetov’s experience with the screenlife genre certainly shows: the information we’re presented with via the Mercy system is always clear and easy to follow, and the film never stays in one mode for too long before moving into another medium — be it video call, 3D graphic of LA streets or the crime scene, a highlighted file from a website, or a social media post that gets zoomed into and picked apart to provide new information. The film gets into shakier ground when it moves away from the screen, between some spotty special effects and murky cinematography from Khalid Mohtaseb, but it looks generally good when Raven is in the chair, without ever really doing anything surprising with its presentation.

If there’s an avatar that best exemplifies the boring, cold competence of “Mercy,” it’s Judge Maddox herself, whom the usually infallibly charismatic Rebecca Ferguson plays with dead eyes and a flat affect that is presumably intentional for portraying what is effectively a screensaver. In the modern landscape, there could be something enjoyably cathartic about letting a chat bot be the big bad our hero has to take down. But alas, “Mercy” opts for the more obvious root of redemption, as Maddox learns to trust the renegade Raven and softens her stance on justice in a way that humanizes the very inhuman character and results in some swings in Ferguson’s performance that become hard to parse.

Expecting a particularly thoughtful examination of AI or police ethics — or even one that delivers a consistent POV — from a film like “Mercy,” which gestures towards concerns about tech in policing and corruption of the forces without really saying anything worth remembering, is perhaps asking for too much. The work of everyone involved — from the sleepy performances to the crew doing an okay but never exemplary job — suggests a first draft, a sense of wanting to get the thing out and move on. At every minute of “Mercy,” you can practically hear the filmmakers saying: “Eh, it’s January. Good enough.”

Grade: C

From Amazon and MGM, “Mercy” is in theaters on Friday, January 23.

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