Franchise veteran Chris Pratt makes a bid to extend his range with this near-future, AI-based thriller, the story of one man pitted against the entity he helped create.
In the Los Angeles of 2029, Pratt plays Chris Raven, a detective who wakes up from a bender in the last place he would ever want to be - The Mercy Court.
Strapped to a chair and facing the AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), Raven is accused of murdering his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis).
Using all the footage - socials, doorbell, bodycam - that must be uploaded by law to the municipal cloud, Raven has 90 minutes to prove his innocence.
If he fails, he will be executed in the chair when the clock hits zero.
With a screenplay by Irish writer Marco van Belle, Mercy gets straight into it, feeling like a mix of a Twilight Zone episode, the Edmond O'Brien-starring 1950s noir classic DOA, and the totalitarian regime of John Carpenter's Escape from New York.
However, a film whose rallying cry is the old 'You've got the wrong man!' chestnut needs to have the right actor in the chair - and this kind of thing is not Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World star Pratt's forte. There's a fair bit of courtroom chewing, and Pratt fares better in some scenes than others.
Bluntly, Mercy would've worked better with Ferguson playing the accused and Pratt as a cop doing the legwork.
Director Timur Bekmambetov gave Pratt his first major movie role in 2008's Wanted, the kind of action-thriller that would suit the A-lister better. Pratt and Ferguson have said that Mercy felt like a play, but to do, ahem, justice to this race against time, the camera should never leave the sci-fi star chamber, and everything should play out on the screens in front of Pratt's character. Instead, it all goes predictably crash, bang, wallop as the case reaches its conclusion.
If you haven't seen the Sydney Sweeney-starring Reality, watch that instead. It's a walls-closing-in masterclass, and, if you're not already scared enough in the present day, it's true.
