REVIEW: MERCY

Everyone who was despairing that Star-Lord and Taser-Face never got their showdown, your moment in the sun has come.

In MERCY, out this weekend, future Los Angeles has adopted a justice system in which criminals are weighed before an AI judge. Those on trial are allowed the full disposal of public surveillance and digital footprints in order to clear their name within a 90-minute timeframe. And this is the situation in which recovering alcoholic and policeman, Chris Raven, (Chris Pratt) find himself as he is charged with the murder of his wife, and he is left to make his case before the commanding Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) or face execution.

The movie's buoyed up by a respectable ensemble cast, including Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Kylie Rogers, Jeff Piere, and Chris Sullivan. Pratt and Ferguson are both up to the task, but we've also seen more memorable work from both of them.

The movie knows what archetypes and universal truths it's invoking. The situation has a flawed husband and father laying all his failings bare before the most impartial of judges and having to ask himself the hard questions about who he was. He says midway through, "The only thing I get to wonder now is how I could have committed a crime of passion when there was no passion left in me." And if he can dare to look at himself honestly, he stands to gain a lot more than just his own life.

The trouble is the film chokes on many of the details and leaves certain contradictions unexamined. Raven was an early champion of the MERCY program, yet within the first 20 minutes, he's railing about how the system determines its outcome right off and the 90-minute trial is all just a formality, like this has been a long-gestating resentment.

Another cornerstone of Raven's characters is that he has a "temper," but the movie is decidedly vague about the specifics. Our onscreen record has him throw a vase on the floor and punch a security camera. But his daughter also confesses to a boyfriend that "dad literally scared the s*** out of me and mom last night." I won't deny that I was left wanting stronger confirmation that the film was not asking me to sympathize with an abuser.

All the while, the movie passes on all sorts of interesting off-ramps connected to the scenario, like the ethics of digital surveillance, before settling on a rather basic, "Well, hey. We all make mistakes." As with a lot of people connected to the arts, I myself don't think we can put enough yellow tape around AI and the way we try to delegate all trying and unpleasant things onto robots, and the tools were certainly in place in this movie to probe that idea. But this movie is resolved that there's an ethical way to use AI, and that a person's natural gumption will be sufficient to fill in the blanks that pure empiricism leaves behind, and we could definitely stew in that for a while.

That all on the table, I'd be remiss to not acknowledge that there is a midpoint switch where the movie starts to find itself more. The motivations of the protagonist and the puzzle he has to claw through start to find more reactivity with one another. And many of the film's central gimmicks pay-off. This is an action movie in which our main player is strapped to a chair and watching the action unfold in some removed location, and yet I never felt disconnected from the battlefront.

MERCY could have been this generation's Minority Report. The base programming was good enough. But while the movie seems to know what answer it wants to give, it seems a little lost on which questions it needs to lead us ask first.

--The Professor

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