Over the past decade, producer/director Timur Bekmambetov's name has become synonymous with the "screenlife" sub-genre. For those who are unaware, screenlife movies play out their narratives on the screens of laptops, tablets, phones and similar devices. Watching someone's desktop for 90 minutes may not sound too exciting but the format has proved surprisingly successful in thrillers like Unfriended, Searching and Profile. Much like the American horror movies of the 1970s took the genre out of its traditional Gothic setting of European castles and transferred it to the US suburbs, screenlife thrillers have a relatable immediacy, their thrills playing out on the sort of screens we stare at every day.
Bekmambetov's latest work as director is a variation on the screenlife format. Rather than watching a screen, here we're watching someone else watch a screen. Set in a crime-ridden Los Angeles, Mercy imagines a near future where the courts have been replaced by AI programmes that serve as judge, jury and executioner. The accused are strapped into a chair in front of a screen that allows them to access the city's "municipal cloud," a database of all footage recorded on CCTV, doorbell cameras, cellphones etc. They have 90 minutes to use the cloud to prove their innocence before the chair ends their life by a sonic blast.
LAPD detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up in such a chair after an alcoholic blackout and finds himself accused of the murder of his wife (Annabelle Wallis in the very definition of a thankless role). His trial is presided over by AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson). Though their marriage was on the rocks due to his drinking, Chris is sure that he couldn't have killed his better half, but with no memory of the past day he must use the cloud to find the real killer and prove his innocence.
As a high concept premise, Mercy certainly grabs your attention, but within minutes its fatal flaw becomes all too apparent. Maddox sets Chris's initial guilt probability at 97.5%, and he must get it down to 92% to hit the threshold of reasonable doubt and be freed from the chair. Thrillers work by putting their protagonists in increasing amounts of danger. Mercy does the very opposite. The more the narrative moves forward, the lower Chris's guilt level drops. 70 minutes into the film, which plays close to real time, he's in far less trouble than he was at the beginning, which just isn't how thrillers are supposed to work. There's only one moment in the film that sees Maddox raise Chris's guilt level. For this premise to work we need Chris to keep digging holes for himself in his impromptu investigation, but as he keeps striking gold there's practically no tension.
Unlike traditional screenlife thrillers, which play out on recognisable screens, Mercy cuts between close-ups of Pratt, an actor who simply isn't interesting enough to carry this role, and the jumble of visual data in front of his eyes. There's so much information being thrown at us that it becomes migraine inducing, and I can only imagine how much worse the experience might be for anyone bold enough to opt for a 3D screening. With footage from millions of cameras accessible, we scratch our heads as we wonder why Chris doesn't make the obvious request of scanning for his face at the time of his wife's murder.
Mercy is so bad it makes looking at Rebecca Ferguson's face feel like torture. The Swede is initially effective in channelling a very annoying customer service jobsworth but as the narrative progresses the AI judge seems to develop an emotional attachment to Chris's case and goes out of her/its way to help him. Rather than critiquing the awful idea of allowing machines to exercise the law, the film ultimately suggests that AI courts might not be such a bad idea. It's yet another example of Hollywood's stealth campaign to promote the virtues of AI, but if the public is to be convinced it's going to take better movies than Mercy, which is exactly what you'll be begging for by the halfway point of this terrible film.
Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan, Kylie Rogers
