Mercy (12A)

Police detective Chris Raven regains consciousness from a drunken night of blood-stained chaos, strapped to a chair inside the Los Angeles headquarters of Mercy Capital Court. He faces Maddox, the artificial intelligence that acts as judge, jury and executioner in a city overrun with crime, drug use and homelessness. Chris sits accused of murdering his wife Nicole in a jealous, alcohol-fuel crime of passion and has 90 minutes to gather evidence to prove his innocence.

LondonNet Film Review

Mercy (12A) Film Review from LondonNet

Human or AI: we all make mistakes. So says the beleaguered hero of director Timur Bekmambetov’s dystopian action thriller – a well-respected 2029 Los Angeles police detective presumed guilty until proven innocent of stabbing his wife to death in cold blood. Mercy orchestrates a frantic hunt for the truth in real-time and makes a few mistakes along the way to a satisfying but belaboured final judgment…

Police detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) regains consciousness from a drunken night of blood-stained chaos, strapped to a chair inside the Los Angeles headquarters of Mercy Capital Court. Motto: Swift Justice For All. He faces Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), the artificial intelligence that acts as judge, jury and executioner in a city overrun with crime, drug use and homelessness. Chris sits accused of murdering his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) in a jealous, alcohol-fuel crime of passion and has 90 minutes to gather evidence using voice commands and a touchscreen to prove his innocence or be sentenced to death by a lethal sonic pulse to the back of the cranium.

Maddox attributes a 97.5% degree of certainty to Chris’s guilt. To escape death, he must introduce sufficient reasonable doubt to persuade the judge to reduce the assessment below a 92% threshold. As the clock ticks down to his execution, Chris liaises with his partner, Detective Jacqueline Diallo (Kali Reis), to piece together clues while repeatedly assuring his daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers) that he is innocent. Unfortunately, Chris is harbouring secrets and even his AA sponsor, Rob (Chris Sullivan), who helped him cope with the death of a police partner (Kenneth Choi), fears the detective could be in denial about the terrible consequences of his actions.

Handcuffed to a 90-minute timer that ticks down relentlessly in one corner of the screen, Mercy is a confidently staged crime thriller that slowly pieces together events leading to Nicole’s death using CCTV recordings, private emails, social media posts, drones and footage conveniently uploaded to the cloud. Bekmambetov visualises a tsunami of communications, text and video files as overlapping screens that whoosh around Pratt in his high-tech executioner’s chair.

The actor is restrained by his wrists and ankles for almost the entire film and runs a gamut of emotions from tearful disbelief to glowering defiance as screenwriter Marco van Belle introduces a multitude of potential suspects and attempts to dissuade us from focusing on the most obvious candidate. The script’s heavy-handedness with foreshadowing diminishes the impact of rough justice and credibility is strained when Ferguson’s imperious AI overrides protocols to become complicit in an explosive showdown. Serious debate about the ethical implications of automated trials is sacrificed at the altar of slam-bang thrills.

– Jo Planter