On paper, Mercy should be a winner: a detective is framed for murder in a near-future L.A. where AI runs the courts. It promises a high-stakes race against a surveillance state, weighing the morality of algorithmic justice. Unfortunately, the film that actually made it to the screen falls far short of that potential, delivering a sci-fi thriller that feels both overfamiliar and oddly lifeless.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the film pits Detective Christopher Raven (Chris Pratt) against an AI-powered judge (Rebecca Ferguson), giving him just 90 minutes to prove his innocence before his fate is sealed by a computer programme and executed shortly after being found guilty.
Bekmambetov leans heavily on his signature “screenlife” style, filtering the story through body cams, drones and security feeds. While this technique can offer intimacy, here it is exhausting. Instead of immersion, the audience is distanced by layers of digital clutter, watching a messy action thriller unfold through a series of overlays.
The script also abandons its most compelling themes. Mercy gestures at the dangers of institutional AI, but it refuses to actually interrogate them. Ferguson’s AI judge could have been a chilling, immovable force; instead, the script transforms her into a standard ally. The moral tension evaporates almost instantly, replaced by a generic hunt for the real culprit that undermines the film’s entire premise.
The action sequences provide only fleeting spectacle. Car chases and hand-to-hand fights are meant to inject adrenaline, but shaky camerawork and green-screen artificiality drain these moments of impact. Large-scale destruction feels weightless, and the visual noise leads more to disorientation than excitement.
The setting also does Pratt no favours. Restricted to a chair for the majority of the runtime, he is denied the physicality he usually leans on in his Marvel roles. This forced reliance on an internal performance exposes a narrow acting range; his trademark earnestness simply isn’t enough to compensate for a hollow script. Ferguson provides a much-needed sense of authority, yet even her talents are wasted by a story that doesn’t quite know how to utilise her screen presence.
Ultimately, Mercy isn’t aggressively bad, it’s just really dumb. It borrows the aesthetic of superior sci-fi films, without grasping the soul of the genre, mistaking technique for tension. For a movie about the dangers of AI, it’s ironically content to let its own creative decisions run on autopilot.
