Mercy (2026) – Release Me

Released: 22nd January
Seen: 23rd March

For better or worse, we live in the era of AI… or at least the era of AI being brute-forced into our daily lives by billionaires who rely on it to turn a profit and make a couple of extra dollars. It’s in everything, it’s in all the apps you use, the very site I post this on offers AI to write a synopsis of what I post (you’ll be happy to know I never use it, I can write shitty unfunny synopsis’ all by myself), and it’s overtaken social media where it does fun things like “makes child sex abuse material” or “endorses white supremacy”. People are now losing jobs and being replaced by AI, which is incredibly faulty and has a high risk of errors… but no error is as big as the error that was made when someone decided to give Mercy a budget and allowed this film to exist because it’s just fucking bad.

Mercy proposes a future where violent offenses are handled by strapping the accused into a chair and allowing an AI-powered judge to berate them for 90 minutes while they try to prove their innocence or else they’re killed at the end of those 90 minutes. Today’s major litigant is Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) who finds himself locked in the chair with AI-Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) presiding over his case. Chris is accused of murdering his wife and now has 90 minutes to prove his innocence, or at least prove enough innocence to drop the probability of him being guilty down to 92% so that he can go free. He has to prove this using phone records, files he somehow has access to within 5 hours of his wife’s murder and, of course, Ring Camera footage from the Ring Cameras that were purchased via Amazon and installed outside his home because lord help us if we don’t include a little bit of advertising for Ring Cameras.

Mercy really does seem like it’s trying to do something interesting here. Blending the court drama with a screenlife thriller is an interesting combination of ideas that a good screenwriter might be able to make work… well we don’t really have one of those, what we have here is a slapdash attempt to force these two genres together to tell a basic story of a wrongly accused man trying to get out of a system that he helped create that doesn’t bother to actually take the time to interrogate why that system might be flawed. Maybe that’s expecting too much for a film that decides the best use of its very expensive lead actors was to have them both sit in chairs, not move that much and spout inane nonsense at each other but it’s still something the film almost seems to want you to expect.

Throughout Mercy we are constantly reminded that this AI justice system is amazing, it is the judge, jury and executioner and it only cares about facts and logic. This is hammered into the audience time and time again but what’s never really pointed out is how stupid the damn thing is. Major bits of evidence that anyone with half a brain would’ve noticed are just ignored, everything is done so comically fast in the name of ‘efficiency’ that there isn’t a moment where anyone actually points out how inefficient and pointless this all is… OK the main villain of the film eventually does, but he’s the villain, you are pretty much never meant to side with them (except in this case where the villain is completely right about how this system railroads people). No time to use this setup to actually talk about the problems with AI or the idea of a justice system based on speed and whatever facts the cops present, why bother when it’s clear that this was just a one off mistake brought on by people who just don’t trust the system enough to let it work as it’s supposed to.

It’s also not helping anyone that the performances that anchor Mercy are just so very bad. It’s probably not helping that both the lead actors spend almost the entire runtime literally sitting in chairs looking at screens but I’ve seen other screenlife films that do this kind of thing and their performers actually make you care about what’s happening. The performers in Searching actually sold how desperate they were to find information, there’s none of that here. It’s impossible to actually really care about our hero, Chris, because he just feels like a stack of cliches instead of a character. Oh no, a deadbeat alcoholic police officer who beats his wife, how original… I mean OK, it’s accurate to reality but it’s also just kind of unoriginal in the world of cinema. The only reason you remember that the character’s name is Chris is because it’s kind of funny that the main character and actor share the same name.

The only potentially interesting element of this entire film is the fact that they do almost all of it in real time, the AI court allows the defendants 90 minutes to plead their case and the film pretty much uses all of it without any real time jumps to sell the idea. It does help give the story some sense of forward momentum, you can actually feel some tension in parts because we are aware that at the 90 minute mark that Chris will be killed by the chair he’s stuck in. You can’t help but feel some sort of tension there as the ticking clock goes down but that tension is marred by the simple fact that Chris is just not an interesting character. No one is, the character in this film that has the most interesting personality is the soulless AI character that’s not meant to have a personality (and her personality is ‘passive aggressive”, which isn’t much but it’s something)

It’s also kind of admirable what Mercy tries to do in order to keep things visually interesting, namely all of the ‘screenlife’ stuff is presented in holograms around the main character in shots that feel almost directly lifted out of Minority Report. It allows them to turn the videos into full 3D renderings of certain moments and really have the characters investigate every scene… but then you also have weird moments like knowing a society that’s got technology this futuristic still uses the same Windows Explorer system that everyone who used a computer after Windows 98 is familiar with, it makes for a strange sense of the future that might be trying to be realistic but honestly just feels like they couldn’t be bothered coming up with a better visual representation of searching through computer folders.

Heck that might just be the perfect way to describe this whole movie, it’s trying its hardest to do something cool and futuristic but mostly it ends up feeling like something I’ve seen before and it’s not a particularly great version of that. You can certainly see elements of Mercy that might work, some ideas that it actually manages to sell or some moments that are effective enough, but for the most part it’s just kind of lifeless and dull without having the nerve to actually do something interesting with its core concept. It has the potential to explore ideas about AI, policing, the justice system and its ability to railroad the innocent but at best it pays lip service to those ideas and moves on because it would rather just make us watch Starlord screaming while strapped to the Justice Cuck Chair.

Mercy isn’t bad enough to be memorable or dumb enough to be funny. It’s a film where the potential is undeniable but it doesn’t even extend a finger towards that potential, let alone actually reach it. It’s a film that exists in the purest sense, you’ve seen films like it do this exact kind of thing before and you’ve seen it done better. Being unoriginal is fine if you’re at least entertaining while doing it, but Mercy doesn’t have the mercy to do that. It’s just dull.