I’ve always considered myself fairly open to new filmmaking techniques. Be it the rise of digital animation, the flood of found footage movies, the return of 3D, or even more avant-garde ways to may the cinema going experience more immersive, I tend to be quite receptive to them if they help enhance the story telling. However, one style of film I’m quickly starting to dread is the movie that has us with the POV of a computer screen as our lead characters spend the majority of the film bouncing around social media and zoom calls. This type of movie actually managed to get off to a decent start with entries like Searching… and Unfriended, but now that studios have latched on to them in order to tell bigger, more expansive stories, some of the newer entries have proven to some of the worst major releases of the modern age. Take last year’s laptop-based adaptation of War Of The Worlds which saw Ice Cube halt an alien invasion armed with a computer and an Amazon account to become an Internet sensation for all the wrong reasons. Well, it seems that a new challenger has entered the arena in the shape of Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy – a movie that sees Chris Pratt go head to head with artificial intelligence while never leaving the comfort of his chair…
The year is… the future and in a time where the police have hovercycles but everyone is still using Instagram, we find America in an unsurprisingly state of political and social turmoil. In an attempt to quell the soaring crime rate in LA, the powers that be have installed the Mercy Captial Court which uses A.I. judges to oversee trials for violent crimes that let’s the accused have unlimited online access to prove their innocence. The bad news is that they only have ninety minutes to do it in and if they fail, they are instantly put to death by the chair they’re clamped into.
One of the strongest advocates for the Mercy programme is detective Chris Raven, who helped bring in the very first subject judged by Mercy, in in a particularly cruel twist of fate, Raven wakes after a night on the booze to find himself in a very worrying predicament. Not only is his drinking an issue as he’d once managed to kick his addiction, but he’s regain consciousness to discover that he’s bolted into a chair and facing A.I. Judge Maddox for the murder of his wife, Nicole. With alcohol blotting out the memory of the previous couple of days and the present evidence giving Raven a guilt probability of 97.5%, he has to get online fast and prove his innocence if he hopes to get that score down past the 92% threshold before his ninety minutes are up.
Desperately trying to find clues, facts and other suspects while confined to a chair, can Raven picture call his way out of deep shit as his life literally ticks away – or is his foggy hiding the horrific act that he did actually stab his wife to death in a drunken rage?
So, while the makers of Mercy probably think that their movie is very on the pulse of current events, a quick glance at the news actually tells us that this movie probably couldn’t have come at a worse time. With news reports of police overstepping it’s bounds and the current raids of ICE within America, a movie where the authorities are finding newer ways to take the humanity out of law enforcement may not be the kind of film audiences want to see right now. Similarly, what with the continued uproar about the continuing threat of A.I. governing more and more of our every day lives, putting out a movie that, for all intents and purposes, is pro-A.I. also feels like another strike against a movie that desperately needs some goodwill. However, on the bright side, while director Timur Bekmambetov has had a few missteps in his career, he also gave us the enthusiastic lunacy of Night Watch and Wanted, so hopes were high he could bring his particular brand of eccentricity to so many hot button topics. Also, the cast prominently features both Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, who both are usually good value for money, so even if current events on our side of the cinema screen may make Mercy seem a bit unappetising, at the end of the day a good movie is a good movie.
However, the real problem is that Mercy is not even close to being a good movie and even more, it’s barely a whisker above the cynical awfulness of that War Of The Worlds adaptation that made us sit and watch Ice Cube order something from Amazon in real time. Even from a fundamental filmmaking standpoint, Mercy simply does everything wrong in an attempt to try and keep things unpredictable – for a start, why would you take a livewire performer like Pratt and literally have him shackled into a sitting position for the majority of the film. Why would you also take an actress of Ferguson’s character and just be an enigmatic face on a screen (even if her jawline is lit like it’s a Viennese sculpture)? And most bizarrely of all, why would you format a film for IMAX that’s mostly shot on jiggling phones and features its lead literally surfing the Web for his life? Nothing about the film makes sense and to cap it all off, while Pratt and Ferguson are forced to verbally joust with both of them literally being unable to move (Ferguson isn’t technically even in the same room), we have a timer located in the top corner of the screen that helpfully counts doen how much time the film has left.
To his credit Bekmambetov strains to make the film as visual as he can, having Maddox unhelpfully project visuals all around Raven like she’s trying to turn his trial into a 4DX screening or something (at numerous points, you’ll notice Pratt’s shirt move like she’s actually blowing air on him, so surely spritzing him with water or fake snow isn’t out of the realms of possibility), but it just doesn’t change the fact that we’re watching a guy in a chair fiddle around online.
Finding that he’s confined to the point where his charm and natural swagger can’t help him out, Pratt resorts to melodrama, screaming, yelling and repeatedly thinking out loud as he tries to piece together his own innocence. Alternatively, Ferguson goes the other route, delivering arched eyebrows and a cut-glass accent as her austere A.I. gradually starts to learn about gut feelings, hunches and bending rules like a low rent Mr. Spock. It certainly ticks the whodunit boxes and it does tell its story in an “innovative” way – but it does so at the expense of it actually being interesting with a lot of the twists and setpieces being kind of laughable. While it doesn’t play its hand as absurdly as War Of The Worlds (also an Amazon production), it continues the notion that recognisable movie stars shouldn’t be signing up for films that has them save the day from the relative safety of a keyboard.
With a format that essentially squeezes every drop of life out of a heavily flawed concept, not even the talents of Ferguson and Pratt can breathe life in this chair-bound, mostly static, cut-price Minority Report. Mercy means forgiveness; Merci is French for thanks. This film deserves neither.
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