Starring Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov

Sony / Amazon MGM – In Cinemas now

In the near future, a detective, accused of murdering his wife, has 90 minutes to prove his innocence to the A.I. Judge he once championed. If he fails, he will be executed by a sonic blast (for some reason).

There has been uproar in the UK in recent months since Justice Secretary David Lammy announced an end to the centuries-old right to jury trials in certain cases. Meanwhile Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is busy selling the merits of A.I. and facial recognition as a future pillar of British policing. They’re going to love Timur Bekmambetov’s high concept tech thriller, Mercy which sees Chris Pratt’s disgraced LAPD Detective Raven fighting for his life against an A.I. judge called Maddox, played by an inscrutable Rebecca Ferguson.

Lammy’s justification for scrapping juries is to ease a backlog of trials that stretches as long as four years for some waiting for their day in court. In Mercy the whole thing will be done and dusted in less than two hours. But before you jump to the conclusion that this is some kind of dystopian Robocop affair, the accused Detective Raven has access to the full range of the A.I.’s data-gathering technology. Gone is the need for months of painstaking, labour-intensive evidence gathering. Thanks to facial recognition, city wide CCTV surveillance, and state access to everyone’s phones and computers everything he needs is at his fingertips in seconds.

Given that the ending and all the twists are predictable from about two minutes in, far from being dystopian, what follows is quite the opposite. With detective and A.I. working in tandem I found myself wondering how soon we could get this seemingly flawless tech up and running in the UK. Lammy and Mahmood could use this movie as a promo for government policy.

Mercy is essentially a nuts and bolts variation on Bekmambetov’s earlier ‘Screenlife’ thrillers, such as Searching and Profile, a subgenre he has pioneered as both producer and director, where the ‘action’ plays out entirely within the confines of a computer interface. I quite enjoyed the first one, Unfriended, buoyed along by its cinematic novelty, but five movies later, including the unwatchably abysmal Screenlife reworking of War of the Worlds, the limitations of the format are all too painfully evident. No matter how much the camera jiggles around, the emotional action of the movies is, by definition, entirely static. In Mercy poor old Chris Pratt has to spend pretty much the whole film manacled to a chair reacting to a narrative disclosed through lengthy ‘info-dumps’.

To be fair, Bekmambetov is clearly aware of the ‘static’ charge (so to speak) and has a go at a full-on action climax, which falls horribly flat as many of the ‘stunts’ have a depressingly lifeless CGI patina to them. We could forgive this if the accompanying script and characterisation wasn’t so laughably melodramatic.

Verdict: As a ‘C’-movie popcorn romp Mercy will entertain for anyone escaping the miserable January chill, but it will require you to leave your brain at the door. But roll on the dystopia, that’s what I say! 4/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com