MERCY Review: Valiant but Underwhelming Attempt at Screenlife Action

Reminiscing about 2016 is all the rage right now on social media, but let’s go rogue for a moment and dig even further – say, let’s rewind to 2008.

At that time, long before becoming Star-Lord and getting into the business of taming Velociraptors, Chris Pratt was Barry. I.e., the asshole friend/ colleague of James McAvoy’s hero in Wanted, Timur Bekmambetov’s first major Hollywood production. It was a small but memorable role, thanks to Barry having the audacity to borrow his friend’s money for condoms to sleep with said friend’s girlfriend, and a later scene where McAvoy rearranges Pratt’s face with a keyboard in slow-mo.

Fast forward to the current day, when Pratt stars in Bekmambetov’s latest directorial outing, Mercy, and his character once again has a complicated relationship with electronics.

Pratt’s cop protagonist, Chris Raven, was all for the scientific advance and the implementation of AI into the judicial system until he woke up with a hangover from hell, bound to a special chair while standing trial for the murder of his wife in front of the AI judge, presented to him as Rebecca Ferguson. For the next 90 minutes, Chris will use voice commands to look through cloud storage, text messages, and various footage, trying to reduce the percentage of his guilt probability and avoid immediate execution by the smart chair.

When approaching Mercy, the most crucial thing to understand about it isn’t the 3D or the IMAX format, or even its curious genre mixture, but the artistic endeavors of its director, Timur Bekmambetov. While most of the international audiences know him from lovably schlocky action films (with a strong B-movie vibe at the core), the viewers from the post-Soviet countries are additionally familiar with a more adventurous side of the director, famous for revitalizing the local movie industry, finding creative ways to tell familiar stories, mixing blockbuster formulas with the national humor and mentality (check out his Night Watch/ Day Watch duet, it’s quite endearing), leaning into the screenlife format, etc.

The only thing you could count on when it came to Bekmambetov’s films was that, no matter how good (Wanted, Profile), or objectively dubious (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) they were, there was always a certain entertainment quality about them that was hard not to give in to, however ridiculous what you saw on the screen was. Which is what makes Mercy so utterly and unexpectedly disappointing: it’s definitely not the most outrageous or silly concept Bekmambetov ever worked with, but it’s certainly the least fun he ever delivered. And yes, that includes the 2016 Ben-Hur.

Partly it’s the script, riddled with problems. Mercy strives to combine two of the director’s great passions: action movies and screenlife thrillers, such as Searching (2018) and Missing (2023), both of which Bekmambetov produced – with mixed results. The films in the Searching universe were compact, intimate tales of two people of different generations (one was spending her whole life online, the other didn’t know what Tumblr was), trying to find their loved ones through the gigabytes of random data, desperately googling and frantically looking for answers in the YouTube comments sections.

Here, the still glamorous, even while supposedly hungover (thus, ensuring the hate of at least some percentage of the audience), Chris Pratt is googling away, trying to save his own life. And even though there is a literal countdown ticking clock on the screen, at no point is there a sense of actual urgency in all of this. Come on, this guy had a pet Velociraptor; there is no way he is going to be offed by a chair!

The scripts for both Searching and Missing were also meticulous and sharp, and while Mercy’s writer, Marco van Belle (for whom it is a second feature screenplay effort), is using a similar approach of briefly introducing seemingly insignificant details to later turn them into twists, that just doesn’t work as well with this material. Maybe it’s that damned ticking clock, which constantly reminds us that there isn’t much time for a bigger story, or it’s the limited cast that doesn’t leave many options for suspects, but you can basically see all the major revelations almost from the get-go.

The choice to use 3D for a film where a guy sits in a chair and yells at the computer is bold, but in reality, that, too, doesn’t offer much aside from the different screens and windows popping right in your face (which, just to say, could be annoying to a lot of dedicated Internet users). The most unexpectedly captivating part here is that Chris immediately forms a validation-seeking relationship with his AI counterpart, and Rebecca Ferguson is a powerhouse who manages to make this connection relatable.

As for the underlying message, it all comes down to an actually pretty mild stance on AI, concluding that both artificial and human intelligence can be wrong. Which is accurate and fair; I’m just not convinced anyone must endure 90-plus minutes of being stuck in a chair to get this point. This includes Chris Pratt, and it definitely includes the viewers.

The film opens Friday, January 23, only in movie theaters, via Amazon MGM Studios. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.