“Mercy” is built around two hooks that feel destined to inspire a lack of enthusiasm among critics. The first is that it stars Chris Pratt, who has not exactly found favor in the twelve years since he held down the center of “Guardians of the Galaxy.” In that movie, he seemed a natural-born star; his likability was part of the film’s chattery spontaneous pre-Marvel-overkill flow. Yet Pratt started to get swallowed up by the top-heavy franchise movies he was in — and it didn’t help that reviewers, weirdly, seemed to hold him almost responsible for his character’s stalker ethics in “Passengers” (2016). Over those last dozen years, he became a B-list presence.
Pratt factor aside, the premise of “Mercy” makes it sound like the sort of thin, doctrinaire anti-technology, anti-police-state thriller that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have starred in 40 years ago (and did, in fact, when he made “The Running Man”). But the movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
In the not-so-far-away future, Pratt’s Chris Raven is an LAPD officer — decent at heart, dirty around the edges — who wakes up after a bender to learn that he has been arrested and strapped into a digitally wired interrogation chair. Accused of killing his wife in cold blood, he is now the latest defendant in the Mercy program, a tolerance-is-for-suckers anti-crime experiment that sounds like pure government-meets-big-tech future-shock fascism. You’re placed on trial in front of an AI-generated enforcer named Judge Maddox (played, in a witty piece of casting, by the elegant Rebecca Ferguson), who is in fact going to be your judge, jury, and executioner. According to the law, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent. Raven has just 90 minutes to defend himself and call up any evidence he wants. If the probability of his innocence dips below 94 percent (i.e., reasonable doubt), he’ll go free. If it doesn’t, he’ll be executed when the clock runs out.
This real-time thriller, in the tradition of “D.O.A.” and “Timecode,” is designed to make us go, “God, what a nightmare system.” And since the prospect of death-by-virtual-judge-by-evidentiary-algorithm sounds like the sort of demagogic idea that might fit all too well into the place America could now be on its way to becoming, we see the timely parallels. Yet as moviegoers, we’re still bracing ourselves for a one-note dystopian thriller-satire.
The first surprise of “Mercy” is that the virtual courtroom Raven finds himself in, with images scrolling around like something out of a pulp version of “Minority Report,” isn’t stacked against him in the way we expect. I mean, it sort of is, but since Raven is free to dial up anything he wants (documents, witnesses, surveillance footage) at the touch of a keypad, he’s got a universe of investigative power at his fingertips. All the evidence will be judged fairly. And since he can zip from one surveillance-camera clip to the next, and use that ability to essentially go back in time, the sheer speed and density with which the clues pile up make “Mercy” an avidly watchable mystery, even if it’s got a rather standard conspiracy plot at its core.
Pratt’s Raven is like a Bruce Willis character from the ’90s, and if he simply headed out into the streets of L.A. to clear his name, the film might feel like wall-to-wall cliché. Instead, scenes of detective action flash by in a pinpoint moment rather than overstaying their welcome. “Mercy,” directed by Timur Bekmambetov (“Wanted”) with a crisp short-attention-span gusto (the film has three editors, and you can see why), is like “Minority Report” meets “Memento” meets “Cops” meets a crime-detective video game. It threads Raven’s investigation through a multimedia mixmaster. And Pratt is compelling in it. He got swallowed up in franchise-ville because he let himself become an actor of bland good vibes, but here he’s sharp and nasty and a bit “dark,” which looks better on him.
At first, of course, the evidence that points to Raven being guilty looks airtight. He and his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis), were in the midst of divorcing, and we see him show up at the house the morning of the murder, angry and reckless, demanding to be let in; minutes later, Nicole is lying in a pool of blood, having been stabbed with a kitchen knife. After the crime, Raven headed to a bar and drank so much that he can’t even remember what happened. (That he spent the last year falling off the wagon, taking nips of whiskey in the garage, only makes him look more scurrilous.) Solving the crime will require quick detours into the lives of his loyal partner who was killed (Kenneth Choi); his new partner (Kali Reis), who seems the soul of trustiness; his blustery AA sponsor (Chris Sullivan); and his teen-brat daughter (Kylie Rogers).
Yet none of them is as fully realized a character as Judge Maddox. She’s a completely programmed presence, but Rebecca Ferguson, speaking in authoritarian tones of dulcet logic, endows her with that barely perceptible twinkle of AI “consciousness.” As the film presents it, the Mercy program is fascistic. And Raven, as we learn, was responsible for bringing to trial its very first defendant. It was a show trial, designed to prove the superiority of judgment-by-AI. But can an AI judge really judge the evidence? Actually, the movie’s sly joke is that an AI judge might be able to do that more objectively than a jury; but it also needs a little human factor to collaborate with. You expect “Mercy” to be anti-AI, but it might be the first film of its era — it will not be the last — to look at AI and ask, “Can we all get along?”
