★ (1 out of 4)
Don’t see “Mercy” at the movies unless you know that you’re in for watching Chris Pratt strapped to a chair for 90 minutes trying to defend himself on a murder charge in front of a judge (Rebecca Ferguson) manufactured, brain to bottom, from artificial intelligence.
Got that? OK, onward. The buzz is that “Mercy” is set to knock “Avatar: “Fire and Ash” off the box office throne after five weeks of dominance. James Cameron’s Goliath deserves a worthier David. “Mercy” has a revolutionary fervor it can’t hope to sustain. It’s also a pretty sorry excuse for entertainment even in January when Hollywood sends its weakest children off to die. And seeing this thing in 3D Imax, as recommended, only makes its jangling ineptitude seem worse.
I’m showing no mercy for this botch job. It’s not just a missed opportunity, it’s a miss on every level and a candidate, even this early in 2026, for one of the biggest misses of the year.
The setting is Los Angeles 2029, hardly “Blade Runner” futuristic but enough ahead for the justice system to have ceded the task of issuing verdicts on capital punishment to digital wisdom. Think of it: Crowded court dates are now a thing of the past. Awash in poverty and crime, the City of Angels has initiated the “Mercy” program for efficiency and speed in justice.
The program’s pr video exults that Mercy serves as “judge, jury, and executioner” in a system where the accused are “guilty until proven innocent” and have only 90 minutes to make their case. If they reduce the guilt meter to under 92 percent, they can escape being fried to a frazzle.
That leaves Pratt’s character, Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt), hoisted on his own petard since he helped put “Mercy” justice on its feet. Now Raven is on the hot seat in an empty room in front of Ferguson’s hologram AI Judge Maddox, pleading for mercy on the charge of murdering his estranged wife Nicole (Anabelle Wallis).
Even with access to every digital file to make his case in real time, Raven appears to be cooked. What we see on the jumble of screens he calls up with private text messages, surveillance footage, testimony from his sponsor (Chris Sullivan), help from his LAPD cop partner Jaq (Kali Reis), even the Instagram account of his teen daughter (Kylie Rogers) is an abusive burnout boozehound.
Intrigued? I was too until director Timur Bekmambetov, working from a script by Marco van Belle, botched so many elements of logic and character. This director can make a scene move like gangbusters, but he also hits a brick wall of incoherence that makes it look like he also had only 90 minutes to keep his movie from self-destructing. At that, he fails big time.
Bekmambetov is the patron saint of the screen life movement in which screens on computers, phones or whatever are an integral part of his process. In such films as “Unfriended,” “Searching,” and “Missing,” he’s made clever use of the eye-frying glare coming off those flat surfaces. I had hopes that “Mercy” would be Bekmambetov’s absurdist comic take on the topic, laughing at us for fear-mongering AI while using it every chance we get.
Sadly, Bekmambetov seems to have misplaced his sense of humor on the way to creating his own “Dr. Strangelove” or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI. At the end, with Raven on the loose to prove his non-guilt in a system rigged against him, “Mercy” drifts into a conventional action movie in which the director seems to have lost his previous gift (see “Wanted”) for action fireworks.
“Mercy” isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a miss on every level and a candidate, even this early in 2026, for one of the biggest misses of the year.