Mercy

Mercy purports to be a cautionary tale about putting legal justice into the hands of AI, but the movie’s real agenda is promoting the surveillance state as a way of fighting crime. We’re meant to be aghast at the prospect of a framed assailant pleading his case before a virtual judge, but we’re also supposed to delight in the use of private phone calls, emails, and security footage in unmasking the real criminal.

This shilling for the end of privacy feels even more sinister coming from Amazon MGM Studios; Amazon’s household surveillance camera Ring — featured prominently in Mercy — has partnered with an AI company called Flock, which shares footage with law-enforcement agencies, including ICE. Director Timur Bekmambetov’s 2025 War of the Worlds, also distributed by Amazon, was merely an embarrassing commercial for the mega-corporation, with Ice Cube saving the world with same-day delivery. Now the director is making actual propaganda for Jeff Bezos’ brand of government compliance.

Bekmambetov — who also produced Searching, Missing, and Unfriended — obviously knows his way around a people-staring-at-screens movie, and that’s what we get here: in the not-too-distant future, LAPD detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up from a drunken stupor and strapped to a chair in the Mercy Court, facing AI-generated Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), who tells him he has 90 minutes to prove that he didn’t murder his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis).

Maddox gives him access to camera footage (from seemingly any device imaginable); his wife’s emails, texts, and voicemails; the secret Instagram account of his teenage daughter (Kylie Rogers); and any other bits of private information that might clear his name. Otherwise, he’ll be executed at the end of the 90 minutes. The irony here is that Raven and his partner Jaq (Kali Reis, True Detective) were among the cops pushing for the Mercy system as an efficient way to deal with crime.

Over the course of his nearly-real-time investigation, Raven manages to blow Maddox’s virtual mind with his gut instincts, developed after years on the force, in opposition to her cool logic. But while the screenplay by Marco van Belle makes the point that crime and punishment involve too many grey areas to be adjudicated by a computer, it never once questions whether or not it’s a violation of the privacy of people living or dead to give Raven this much access to their personal data. (Mercy even has to introduce a burner phone at one point to give a character some moments shielded from prying eyes.)

Politics aside — though that’s enough to send this film back to where it came from — the screenplay strains credulity at every juncture. The plot to frame Raven is contingent on the policeman doing something that no one could predict, and the identity of the real villain becomes obvious thanks to what Roger Ebert used to call “the law of the economy of characters”: anyone in the movie who seems extraneous or unnecessary automatically turns out to be the bad guy.

It would be much easier to dismiss Mercy entirely if it didn’t occasionally brush up against competence, and to his credit, Bekmambetov knows his way around what he calls a “Screenlife” movie, building a full world around one character forced to stare at a screen and another trapped inside of one. (It helps that Jaq gets to tool around L.A. on a drone that flies her all over town.) And while Pratt has become the most stultifying of screen presences — he was a lot more fun to watch back when Bekmambetov cast him in a small role in 2008’s Wanted — Ferguson and Reis are both as electrifying as the material allows them to be.

At this point, we expect characters to watch Netflix shows within a Netflix movie, or to use Apple products in an Apple TV production. But no one should be buying what Amazon is trying to sell here.

Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Screenwriter: Marco van Belle
Cast: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan, Kylie Rogers
Producers: Charles Roven, Robert Amidon, Timur Bekmambetov, Majd Nassif
Executive producers: Mark Moran, Todd Williams
Director of photography: Khalid Mohtaseb
Production design: Alex McDowell
Editing: Austin Keeling, Dody Dorn
Music: Ramin Djawadi
Sound design: Robert Mackenzie, re-recording mixer/sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Amazon MGM Studios, Atlas Entertainment, Bazelevs
In English
100 minutes