‘Mercy’ Review

Burt Macklin, the alter-ego FBI agent of Andy Dwyer, Chris Pratt’s breakout TV role from ‘Parks and Recreation’, works so wonderfully because all of his imagined plots are transparently ludicrous even as the character treats them with the utmost gravity. But we, the audience, and every other character sees them for the joke that they are, even as they play along.

‘Mercy’ feels like a Burt Macklin movie without any of the self awareness or humor, favoring instead melodrama and cheaply shot action that feels more like a television movie of the week than the star studded sci-fi thriller it so desperately wants to be.

The film opens with Chris Pratt’s Detective Christopher Raven – a name somehow more absurd than Burt Macklin – waking up locked into a steel chair before a large screen, on which Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), an AI judge, jury and executioner, informs him that he has been arrested for murdering his wife, and now has 90 minutes to plead his case to the so-called Mercy court and prove his innocence or be executed.

After breaking through on TV as the lovable buffoon Andy Dwyer in ‘Parks and Recreation’, then cementing his movie star credentials with ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, it seemed Chris Pratt had a firm grasp on a superstar persona: snarky underdogs who aren’t afraid to be silly. Yet as his career has gone on, he has moved further and further from the types of roles that work for him, abandoning humor in favor of gruff, stoic alpha males straining to be taken seriously. In ‘Mercy’, Pratt might not smile a single time, which makes sense for the character, given that he’s an abusive alcoholic who hand waves aside his failings as a father and husband as he stands accused of his wife’s murder, but it doesn’t play to Pratt’s strengths as a performer and the result is abysmal.

While Chris Pratt’s career choices writ large can be questioned, I’m also curious why Rebecca Ferguson is in this. I usually enjoy her as an actress, but her role as the humanoid embodiment of justice is inconsistent and bewildering. In some moments Ferguson is robotic, which makes sense given she is a glorified AI chatbot, but in others she exhibits a confusing amount of personality, casting smirks, arched eyebrows, and withering glares of judgment upon Pratt.

Director Timur Bekmambetov does his best to dramatize the process of searching through computer files throughout the movie. These efforts make sense given that otherwise the entire movie would just be alternating close-ups of Pratt and Ferguson looking at one another. But while trying to avert such a visually uninteresting movie, Bekmambetov unfortunately still delivered a visually uninteresting movie, just with more things thrown at the viewer, bringing to mind a bad PS2 video game with half-baked sci-fi technology and amateurish first person action sequences.

At occasional moments, I found myself sucked into the mystery, not necessarily because anything clever was occurring but moreso because I was just curious if the film would even try to tie all of the various threads together. But as the twists and turns landed, I resigned myself to the fact that ‘Mercy’ is as nonsensical as it is pretentious, thinking it has something original or creative to say about technology’s use in law enforcement.

Persisting as it does largely of one man, sitting in a single room, staring at a computer screen, ‘Mercy’ feels like a more polished and considered version of last year’s atrocious ‘War of the Worlds’. And in its sci-fi conceit, exploring humanity’s embrace of a futuristic technology that promises to bring about a utopia, this film recalls Steven Spielberg’s masterful ‘Minority Report’. But ‘Mercy’ is neither a poignant commentary on humanity’s desperate search for a cure-all technology, willfully ignorant of its flaws, nor is it an engaging action mystery. In the end, it’s a cheap, forgettable slog.

Mercy
Rated R for language, some violent/bloody images and brief drug use.
Running Time: 1 hour and 40 minutes

Director Timur Bekmambetov
Writers Marco van Belle
Stars Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson
Rating R
Running Time 100 Minutes
Genres Action, Crime, Drama, Sci-fi, Thriller