“I wasn’t designed to feel,” Judge Maddox says coolly, staring down the man whose fate she holds in her hands. It’s a line that cuts to the heart of Mercy, director Timur Bekmambetov’s near-future thriller that asks a simple, chilling question: what happens when the justice system loses the human element?
Set in 2029 Los Angeles, “Mercy” follows Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt), a decorated LAPD officer who wakes up disoriented, handcuffed to a chair and charged with the murder of his own wife. Presiding over his case is Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), an artificial intelligence — and the very system Raven himself helped design and champion. The irony is immediate and biting. The man who once stood before cameras praising Mercy’s efficiency now has 90 minutes to convince it he isn’t a killer. Fail, and the sentence is death, carried out the moment the verdict is handed down.
The rules of the court give Raven access to the entire city’s “Municipal Cloud.” Every doorbell camera, phone, drone, body cam and surveillance feed in Los Angeles are at his disposal to aid him in proving his innocence. It’s a staggering amount of material, and the film uses it cleverly. Rather than a traditional courtroom drama, “Mercy” unfolds through a constant stream of footage: grainy cellphone clips, crisp IMAX shots, restaurant security feeds and a neighbor’s bird cam. The result is a visual experience that genuinely keeps you on your toes. The cinematography of this film is quite praiseworthy. Bekmambetov knows how to make the contrast between polished and raw footage feel purposeful, each clip adding another piece to the puzzle Raven is frantically trying to solve.
Pratt carries most of the film from that chair, and he does it better than you might expect. Raven is not an easy character to root for. Early footage paints him as volatile and harsh toward his wife, and his history with alcohol doesn’t help his case. But Pratt threads a needle between defensiveness and vulnerability that makes you want to follow him anyway. Ferguson, meanwhile, is quietly remarkable as Maddox. Playing an entity with no emotions is a role that could easily fall flat, but she gives the AI a cold, precise presence that makes every exchange feel genuinely unsettling. The back-and-forth between a desperate man and a judge who simply cannot care about his desperation is where the film is most compelling.
The themes “Mercy” reaches for are timely and worth taking seriously. Mass surveillance, AI in the justice system and the ethics of speed over nuance aren’t distant sci-fi concerns. They’re conversations happening right now. The film feels relevant in a way that gives it weight beyond its thriller mechanics. When Maddox coldly recites a 97.5% probability of guilt and prepares to act on it, the horror isn’t in the number. It’s in what’s missing: doubt, mercy and the human instinct to desire the innocence of the accused.
That said, the film isn’t without its cracks. The most glaring one: for a man with access to every camera in the city, the one thing conspicuously absent is any footage of his wife’s actual murder. It’s a gap the plot needs to function, and the movie doesn’t do quite enough to explain it away. It’s the kind of logic hole that’s easy to overlook in the heat of the moment but lingers afterward.
Where the film ultimately lands is interesting. It doesn’t fully condemn the AI court, nor does it entirely defend it. By the end, “Mercy” seems to argue that the technology isn’t the villain — the people behind it are. AI can gather every data point in existence, but it still lacks a soul. It can calculate guilt to four decimal places and never once ask whether the system that produced the evidence was itself corrupt.
Mercy is not a perfect film. It has plot conveniences, and its third act gets a little loud. But it is a genuinely engaging one, anchored by two strong performances and a premise that feels ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. In a world where AI is already reshaping how we work, create and communicate, a movie about what it might mean to let it decide who lives and who dies doesn’t feel like fantasy — it feels like a warning.