The quality of Mercy is not strained. It may, however, be non-existent.
The plot of Timur Bekmambetov’s low(ish)-budget sci-fi thriller involves a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence program designed to process murder cases more swiftly than an overcrowded legal system; headquartered in a crime-ridden, near-future Los Angeles circa 2029, the Mercy Court functions smoothly as judge, jury, and executioner. Here’s how it works: The defendant, who is strapped into an electric chair, is given digital access to all of the facts and data of their case, and the ability to contact witnesses as needed, as well as using them (and their body cameras) as investigative proxies. The defendant has 90 minutes to parse through evidence, chase leads, and establish a threshold of reasonable doubt before getting fatally zapped.
Guilty until proven innocent, in other words, and Mercy, which stars Chris Pratt as an LAPD officer accused of murder and Rebecca Ferguson as his photorealistic, all-knowing interlocutor, has already been judged harshly in the court of public opinion. The goofiness of the film’s plotline, compounded by the desolation of its release date, constitute persuasive circumstantial evidence that it sucks, but if the history of Dumpuary Cinema has taught us anything, it’s that the line between genuine offenders and decent B-movies snuffed out on trumped-up charges is thin indeed. With this in mind, Mercy deserves at least a fair hearing, and not from an AI magistrate, either. How about this instead: an objective, historically infallible Ringer writer who, in the spirit of the Mercy Court’s mandate for efficiency, will rigorously subdivide his own consciousness between prosecutorial skepticism and sympathetic devil’s advocacy. For extra authenticity, I’m writing in the most uncomfortable chair possible. Feel free to start a countdown clock as you read on … ideally, it’ll take 10 minutes or so to determine whether Mercy is worth an hour and a half of your precious time.
Welcome to the Mercy Court. In the film, Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) awakens from a hangover to discover that he’s on trial for fatally stabbing his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis); surveillance footage puts him at the scene of the crime, there are splatters of his DNA all over the place, and he’d recently fallen off the wagon. (He has no memory of the night in question.) Chris’s AA sponsor, Rob (Chris Sullivan), doesn’t seem too happy to take his call; his teenage daughter, Britt (Kylie Rogers), hates his guts. Chris had means, motive, and opportunity to kill Nicole; not only that, there are no other suspects, likely or otherwise. At the beginning of the trial, Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) informs Chris that his likely guilt level is hovering somewhere around 96 percent, and he has to get that down to 92 percent in order to survive.
Given the preposterousness of its premise and the recent track record of its collaborators, it seems fair to place the same standards on Mercy. This movie is visually ugly, conceptually derivative, and riddled with logistical inconsistencies from beginning to end. For instance: Considering that Chris apparently helped engineer the Mercy Court in the first place, why is he surprised by the way it works? The solution to the mystery is somehow predictable and absurd at the same time, like an episode of Matlock by way of Minority Report. The badness is all-encompassing, and self-evident—it’s the cinematic equivalent of fingerprints on a murder weapon, or Tim Robinson in a hot dog costume looking around for the real culprit. The margin of error for defending a movie as terrible as Mercy is slim to non-existent. If you just give up now, we can go home early and get back to talking about The Bone Temple. How do you plead?
Your Honor, we plead not guilty. Or rather, we plead guilty to the charge of Mercy being a guilty pleasure, which is to say that it isn’t guilty of anything at all.
Uh-oh. By invoking the phrase “guilty pleasure”—a term that doesn’t mean anything, and never has—you’ve triggered the kill switch. Nice knowing you.
Wait, wait, can the last thing I said be stricken from the record? I mean, you went through all this trouble to build the chair and get me here and everything … I take back the “guilty pleasure” thing, but I also think that, like Detective Raven, I can try to establish reasonable doubt about it being a total disaster. I mean, not to get too deep into spoiler territory, but obviously Pratt’s character is able to move the needle a little bit by constructing a plausible version of events that lets him off the hook (call it One Angry Man). I think that I deserve the same chance. Permission to proceed without being executed?
Fine, but if you continue to use phrases like “guilty pleasure” or “so bad that it’s good,” the next sound you hear will be your brains being scrambled by a lethal sonic pulse.
[Straightening tie] Still got it. Anyway, you said something about “the recent track record” of Mercy’s creators, and I want to push back against that a little bit. I assume that you’re preferring primarily to the film’s director, Timur Bekmambetov?
Yes. Let the record show that Mr. Bekmambetov—a self-styled mogul who owns the former Disney Mansion in Los Angeles—was the producer of the consensus worst movie of 2025, a screenlife remake of War of the Worlds, subsidized by Amazon Prime and featuring some of the most ostentatious product placement in movie history. When Ice Cube’s character needs a flash drive at the climax, he has it delivered by Prime Air, a drone ex machina that sullies the legacy of H.G. Wells.
OK, let me get this straight: When Carol Sturka gets a nuke airlifted to her door in Pluribus, it's a wry satire of click-through consumer culture, but here it’s just craven brand extension? I liked what Bekmambetov said about the film, which was that it was trying to honor the legacy of Orson Welles’s legendary 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds by updating the technological methodology. “Back then, [Welles] used radio, the most popular technology of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real,” he told Deadline. “Today, that medium is the screen of our devices.”
For mentioning Timur Bekmambetov in the same paragraph as Orson Welles, I am bumping the Guilt-o-Meter to 97 percent.
Withdrawn. But honestly, he’s been involved with some good movies, including and especially the Unfriended diptych. As I wrote six years ago, Unfriended: Dark Web (which he produced) is a nasty, trenchant little horror movie that addresses the online commodification of violence and suffering (it’s a bit like Red Rooms before Red Rooms). His backstory is compelling stuff: He moved from Uzbekistan to Moscow in the 1990s to make commercials; Night Watch was the first Russian blockbuster made after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2008, Wanted made $300 million and helped lay the gun-ballet template for the John Wick series. Since then, he’s become synonymous with screenlife cinema, lending his imprimatur to a wide range of titles, even if he’s fallen short of his former goal of releasing 50 movies a year.
What about the fact that he once caped—a bit ambiguously, but still—for Vladimir Putin? Or that he’s trying to train AI to be better Method actors using the Stanislavski technique?
Yeah, that’s not great, but at least he knows who Stanislavski was. For a technocrat, he’s pretty eccentric, fittingly so for a guy who once worked for Roger Corman (if you see only one DTV Russian-made female gladiator movie featuring Playboy centerfolds, make it 2001’s The Arena). Screenlife is as much a gimmick as an aesthetic strategy, and Bekmambetov has his eye on the bottom line: “Don’t think of AI as an angel or as the devil,” he told Variety. “Yes, it will take jobs, but what we need to focus on is how do we direct it and use it properly.”
That’s sort of how Mercy treats AI, though—cynical ambivalence without conviction. That’s not a good thing. The script is caught between being a cautionary tale about the dangers of authoritarian overreach and a celebration of state-of-the-art innovation, as well as the idea that the ends justify the means. It turns out that the Mercy Court isn’t exactly the villain of the piece; it actually works just fine. There’s no real moral or ethical dilemma in the film. Instead, the drama lies in the way Detective Raven—by all accounts a lousy husband and father, and a pretty crappy police officer, too—earns a shot at redemption by following the rules and coaxing some empathy out of Judge Maddox. (Cue the eternal question: Can a machine learn to love?) If anything, it’s basically a buddy-cop movie, with banter and life lessons and car chases.
On that point: The level of property damage—and the escalating body count—required to potentially clear Detective Raven’s name is unintentionally hilarious … about half of Los Angeles gets levelled by the end.
It is pretty funny. But then, Wanted was hilariously misanthropic as well. I remember the ending of that movie, when James McAvoy’s assassin snuffs out his rival and taunts the audience by breaking the fourth wall and asking us, “What the fuck have you done lately?” I can accept that Bekmambetov is a mean-spirited filmmaker who’s only interested in matters of life and death as plot points; there’s something endearing about how shamelessly Mercy embraces its array of genre clichés, starting with that primal, paranoid wrongfully-accused scenario, and also how it takes the closed-room, real-time conceit and opens it up via all of those panoptic perspectives.
You know, somehow I don’t think Michel Foucault would be impressed by Mercy, even if he saw it in 3D. He’d also probably say something about Chris Pratt being a lousy actor.
I can’t defend Pratt’s performance except to say that Detective Raven isn’t supposed to be likeable. Maybe there’s something to the fact that the character is trapped somewhere he doesn’t want to be and trying to make it through in one piece, and Pratt’s acting reflects the surrounding circumstances. I bet he’d like to take his agent to the Mercy Court.
For being honest about Pratt, the Guilt-o-Meter is going back to 96 percent. You have to concede that the movie is a waste of Rebecca Ferguson, though. As Ilsa Faust in the Mission: Impossible series, she’s so fun to watch run and jump around. Here she’s just shot from the neck up, talking in monotone.
I kept hoping that Judge Maddox would use the Voice from Dune. I do think that Ferguson is trying to honor a tradition of placidly deadpan, evilly obsequious AIs dating back to HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Flip the kill switch…
…or at least doing a half-decent Siri impression… I get the feeling I’m not really convincing you.
Not really. Do you have any last words, about Mercy or in general?
Here goes: In the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, Tony Shalhoub’s high-priced defense attorney Freddy Riedenschneider is inspired by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; he becomes obsessed with the idea of reasonable doubt, and tries to get Billy Bob Thornton’s Ed Crane off by invoking not the facts of the case, but existential philosophy. He tells the people gathered in the courtroom that Ed is too profoundly ordinary to be a killer; that his ordinariness makes him nothing less than the “modern man” himself. By this logic, if the jury were to find Ed guilty, they’d be only indicting themselves. “It was a pretty good speech,” Ed tells us laconically via voiceover. “Even had me going.”
Mercy isn’t a good movie by a long shot, but the idea that it’s somehow extraordinarily bad—beyond the algorithm of the Tomatometer, or the fuzzy math of reasonable doubt—seems unfair. Instead, I’d say that its problems are all too ordinary: a high concept brought low by middling execution; an allegory about our tendency to rush to judgement made without conviction. But not without its pleasures, guilty or otherwise. To paraphrase one of the great pieces of 21st-century film criticism: Why must a movie be good? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see Rebecca Ferguson’s face, huge? [Freddy Riedenschneider voice] Look closely at this movie—this goofy, confused, and basically useless movie—and you see the Hollywood dilemma. This is modern Hollywood. This is your reflection.
That was a pretty good speech. Even had me going.
Does that mean I’m free to go?
Your sentence is to sit through Mercy a second time and come back with a better argument.
Flip the switch, please.
