Mercy is a movie constructed of shameless copaganda and gross A.I. apologia. It’s no wonder that Jeff Bezos -whose Amazon owns MGM- is ultimately behind it. It is also little surprise that Chris Pratt, whose personal conservative proclivities have come out more and more frequently in recent years, is its central star, though spending much of the movie sat in a chair. The film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, of Wanted and more appropriately last year’s disastrous War of the Worlds adaptation and uses a similar dependence on storytelling through screens here -a gimmick that was once neat and interesting when something like Searching was a one-off, but has become increasingly dull and repetitive a conceit. How many times do we need to zoom in on a new tab or window opening? At least this one lets us see into Pratt’s immediate surroundings.
Extremely faint praise though and about all that this movie deserves as it seems to exist as the Devil’s Advocate for artificial intelligence -very broadly rejected by the entertainment industry. In an effort to sell it, Rebecca Ferguson is cast as the A.I. bot Judge Maddox, presiding over a largely real-time hearing for Pratt’s Chris Raven, an LAPD officer with rage and alcohol issues fairly credibly accused of murdering his wife. His fate is in the hands of the Mercy Court, an A.I. infrastructure recently designed to process a defendant’s guilt and then summarily execute them. Believing himself to be innocent, Raven spends his hearing trying to solve the mystery of who really killed his wife using all the digital tools at the Court’s disposal.
This is done with no regard for the personal privacy of various people’s accounts and information, presented by the film as a necessity for Raven to achieve justice. Carelessly, he hacks into his daughter's phone, the emails of a suspect, and private cameras in pursuit of his own vindication. We are meant to see him as justified in this, but that is hard to do -in part because of its inherent moral reprehension, in part because Pratt and the script struggle to present Raven as a genuinely good and guiltless person, and beyond the point where we are meant to see him that way. The troubled and violent man who demanded entrance into his house where his wife feared for her safety is still a grossly unlikeable character, even if he didn't actually kill her; and a fall back into alcoholism after a period of sobriety isn't a valid excuse. Raven apologizes and takes accountability for some of his behaviour, but the context (him being a cop with the associated misogyny) and the short span of time the movie takes place in renders the sentiment impotent.
It's not an effective perspective from which to generate sympathy, and the dull contours of the space he is held in don't help matters. On an arbitrary basis it becomes an entire virtual reality around him, but for the most part is just empty save for the screen in front of him. And again, this style of presentation is by nature incredibly visually dreary -even with all the video feeds to different people in different corners of the city. The film hopes to keep your attention in spite of this through the mystery component and tension around both the ticking clock for Raven and the fluctuating calculated status of his guilt -north of 90% for most of the film. But it is all very boilerplate investigation that is not particularly interesting, until a point where it does go off-the-wall via some surprise backstory and twist connections that are too dumb and contrived to take in with anything serious -and that includes a half-assed appeal at a moderately more liberal point.
Such charity means little though. While Mercy is made by the kinds of people and bodies who would be the first to opine the work is apolitical, it is a very brazenly, deliberately right-wing Hollywood movie of the kind that occasionally got made in the 1980s (especially in the action genre), but were often crafted with either greater skill or more boisterous flourishes. This movie has neither, and so its dominant ideology of reverence towards authoritarian tactics of the police force, characterization of opponents as violet ideologues not caring who they harm in pursuit of their goal, and undertones of dismay regarding the rights of ordinary citizens is much more overt and difficult to avoid.
What makes it a little more unique to this era is how these are paired with the most sympathetic portrait of A.I. (and in a form that broadly resembles its consequential real world namesake) that I’ve seen in a movie in the last several years. It’s incredibly friendly to the perspectives of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying in vain to convince us we should all be rapidly adopting their ethically bankrupt and perverse theft machines for the good of social innovation. And it’s a bit insidiously designed, because the movie seems to indicate early that it is the algorithmic flaw of this Mercy Court that has Raven where he is and at a few points in his investigation (whilst fully using A.I. tools) he remarks on the uniqueness of human ingenuity over machines. But eventually Judge Maddox becomes clearly an ally more than an adversary, with implied feelings of her own, and the Mercy Court itself is even vindicated, with the whole circumstance having been engineered by a human deceiving the A.I. Knowing the reality the movie arrives in, Raven at one point attempts a meagre middle-ground (which amounts to a sentiment of both humans and A.I. being “equally” flawed but needing to co-exist, especially in institutional terms like the Mercy Court). It is a tone-deaf sentiment to put it mildly, glaring appeasement to the A.I. figureheads invading the film industry, and is a gross oversimplification even in context.
The action is also quite poor in context, if not obvious by the fact so much of the film restricts its central character to a chair with only novel effects in front of and around him to provide any kind of visual engagement. Through the cameras Judge Maddox accesses, it is first-person and frenetic, but even once Raven does get out of his restraints and has to be part of the conventional action climax, it’s very dull and uninspired, with too many quick cuts and new angles dicing up the momentum and little sense of choreography. A car chase precedes this, but is essentially played with the emptiness of substance of a Grand Theft Auto game -the major payer, a long-haul truck, easily knocking all obstacles out of its way with no real sense of impact. And the sequence moves rather slowly as well, especially compared to other L.A.-based action movies that understood far better how to use their setting.
The Minority Report or tech-bro conservatism, it’s no mystery why Mercy was made; and it definitely has a demographic, rather small though it may be. But there is little effort to temper its politics through art, designed with an incredibly limiting and swiftly unimpressive structure and a mystery that has almost no real tension to it. It would be a far better movie if Raven actually were the killer and his efforts to clear his name a facade -it might even make the pro-A.I. argument tenable. Instead it’s just a vacuous thriller of confirmation bias for awful people. In other words, garbage.
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