Silly, cliché, and slightly disturbing. Mercy ultimately isn’t anything good.

A law enforcer finds himself on trial for the murder of his wife. His judge, jury, and executioner is a powerful AI program.

Mercy stars Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, who both must have needed to pay off private yachts or something. Timur Bekmambetov directs and, in his defence, started out with Day Watch and Night Watch (two visually interesting and silly vampire movies) but more recently… Well, we will get to that. Pressingly, Mercy is an MGM production. Read: an Amazon production. Oh, dear.

So what is the verdict?

The film follows Chris Pratt’s character, creatively called Chris. He is one of the police officers spearheading the use of the Mercy justice system. The story explains a dystopian future when crime “affects millions” (a bit of an understatement) and sections of cities are cordoned off as violent “red zones”. To implement, everyone needs to submit their digital devices and cameras to the “municipal cloud”; a means for this AI judgment system to collect any and all data.
On top of that, the Government has implemented a special police force to keep the peace. Yikes.

To say this film starts off with the most tone-deaf premise since TRON: Ares, would be an understatement. Audiences should be shifting in their chairs uncomfortably as footage of this specialist police force restrain people on the streets. This montage carries on into Pratt’s (sorry, Chris Raven’s) awakening in a liminal room, being accosted by the Mercy program’s “welcoming message.” Judge Maddox (Ferguson) announces that all defendants are guilty-until-proven-innocent. Chris has 90 minutes to prove his own innocence.

This is a dystopian future, pure and simple. I was not sure, for the entire movie, what the narrative was trying to evoke. Unsettlingly, it appears to be pro-dystopia? This isn’t a tongue-in-cheek, laugh at how horrible this is. I guess that tracks if Amazon is the production studio.

What follows is a police procedural with Pratt tied to a chair. It is eerily similar to 2025’s infamous War of the Worlds (also from Amazon) adaptation, with the majority of film being “found footage” and camera footage that Pratt is watching and discussing over with Maddox. Unsurprisingly, after the initial shock of its setup, the film proceeds to be uninteresting. As alluded to earlier, director Bekmambetov was a producer on that film too…

There is a kernel of a good idea here, but it is obvious the studio didn’t want to spend money. That, or Ferguson and Pratt’s pay checks took most of the budget. There are some laughable CGI vehicles during helicopter “chase cam footage.” As well as projections of light that go “woosh.” Literally. These projected images make Pratt’s hair move. The audience is bombarded with graphical projections, guided user interfaces, and video recordings, making this a post-production nightmare.
Product placement is rife once again. Although not as bad as War of the Worlds (to be fair, any worse than that and the film would simply be an advert) I am not sure what’s more unbelievable: a distant future with a fully AI justice system, or a distant future where the kids are still using Instagram.

Since our protagonist is rooted to a chair, the actual investigation in the second act is sterile and textureless. Everything taking place beyond screens. The final act is hokey and desperate. Could the cold, algorithmic program exhibit… feelings??

It is truly hard to say if Mercy is actually worse than War of the Worlds, purely by the fact that the 2025 film made me laugh. Objectivity, Mercy is better, but it isn’t worth it.

Just watch Minority Report again.

Additional Marshmallows: The trailer touts “from the producer behind Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight. Absolute spin. Mercy has ten producer credits.