January has been a dumping ground for movies. And “Mercy” the latest film from stylish director Timur Bekmambetov does nothing to change that. The studio behind the film is Amazon/MGM and why they just didn’t dump this on Prime is beyond me.
“Mercy” is frustrating in a very specific way: it’s the kind of movie that almost convinces you it has something to say, then keeps sidestepping the point until everything collapses under its own contradictions. What makes that sting more is that I actually like the director. Timur Bekmambetov has always been a risk-taker, someone willing to experiment with form and momentum, and you can feel that instinct here. Mercy moves. It’s cleanly edited, tightly paced, and never drags. But motion isn’t meaning, and speed can’t replace conviction.
From the jump, the film wants to be a Philip K. Dick adaption so badly it’s distracting. Near-future Los Angeles. A justice system run by AI. A ticking clock. A man accused of a crime he swears he didn’t commit. On paper, it’s a solid hook. In execution, it’s hollow—and at times, actively uncomfortable.
The biggest problem is the person “Mercy” asks us to root for. Chris Raven, played by Chris Pratt, is positioned as flawed but fundamentally noble. The film seems to believe that not murdering his wife is enough to earn our sympathy. That’s a low bar. He’s an abusive alcoholic who terrifies his daughter, admits to destroying things his wife cherished simply to hurt her, and—most damningly—is a vocal supporter of the wildly unconstitutional AI court system right up until it turns on him.
Watching him suddenly discover civil liberties only after his own are threatened is a tough sell, especially right now. My patience for characters who cheer authoritarian systems until they’re personally inconvenienced is paper thin. The film frames him as a tragic figure; he plays more like a cautionary one.
Pratt, for his part, is clearly in paycheck mode. He’s competent, professional, and disengaged in that familiar way—hitting his marks, running when told, grimacing on cue. There’s no sense of interrogation here, no curiosity about the material. It’s performance by muscle memory.
What’s stranger is that the film’s most sympathetic presence ends up being the AI judge, played by Rebecca Ferguson, who’s completely wasted. “Mercy” insists the system is terrifying—judge, jury, and executioner rolled into code—yet keeps nudging us toward the idea that maybe the AI just needs better tuning. More empathy. A software patch. The film wants to condemn AI overreach while quietly endorsing it as a “necessary evil,” especially when it conveniently helps our hero survive.
That contradiction runs through the surveillance state as well. Forcing citizens to store their entire digital lives on a government cloud is framed as dystopian—until it becomes the only thing that saves Raven. Mercy shows no interest in grappling with that tension. It shrugs and moves on.
Add in an unnecessary IMAX 3D release—visual bloat for a story that gains nothing from scale—and the result is a slick, empty experience. “Mercy” isn’t just a bad movie. It’s a confident one pushing deeply troubling ideas under the cover of a brains-off action thriller.
And that’s what lingers—not entertainment, but the uneasy sense that the movie knows exactly what it’s doing, even if it doesn’t want to admit it.
Final Grade : D-
“Mercy” opens in theaters today .
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