All Style, Surface-Level Substance That Borrows Its Ideas
Mercy is the kind of cyber-thriller that sounds sharper on paper than it ultimately feels in practice: sleek, nervy, conceptually potent, but too often skimming along the surface of borrowed ideas it never fully dives into.
Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) leans hard into his techno-formalist instincts here, filling the frame with futurist UI, AR overlays, and rapid-fire virtual reconstructions.
The hook is genuinely gripping: a near‑future detective, accused of murdering his wife, given 90 minutes to prove his innocence to the very advanced A.I. Judge he once championed. As a premise, it’s tight, unnerving, and disturbingly plausible.
Structurally, the film is a real-time pressure cooker. Chris Pratt’s character spends almost the entire runtime strapped into a high-tech “hot seat,” physically immobilised.
At the same time, his life over the last 24 hours is replayed, deconstructed, and weaponised against him in a fully immersive VR courtroom. Bekmambetov uses this conceit to justify an aggressive editorial style: timelines fracture and recombine, memory fragments float into view, perspectives shift mid-scene, and we’re constantly shuttled between the sterile interrogation chamber and the messy, hyper-detailed reconstructions of the day in question.
From a purely technical standpoint, the film is often impressive.
The problem is that, beneath all of this formal innovation, Mercy remains oddly shallow.
The cinematography leans into that cool, neon-tinged futurism; the editing is razor‑tight; the interfaces and visualisations of the A.I. system have a crisp, believable logic. Yet the script rarely lets these elements become more than décor. The A.I. Judge is a fascinating figure conceptually-an algorithm acting as arbiter of truth and fate-but the film tends to treat it more as a menacing plot device than a character or system worth truly interrogating. You feel the potential for rich, unnerving questions about bias, training data, systemic power, and the legal abdication of human responsibility, but those questions are mostly nodded at rather than explored.
Chris Pratt ends up being the glue that holds the whole thing together. This is very much a performance-in-a-box film for him: he’s anchored to the chair, but asked to run the full emotional gamut, from disbelief and panic to anger, guilt, and defiance. Pratt leans into a more grounded, desperate register than his usual quippy persona, and it mostly works. Even when the dialogue veers into on‑the‑nose exposition, he gives you enough humanity to stay locked in with him, which is crucial when so much of the film is literally his face versus a disembodied, omniscient system.
The special effects and virtual environments are, for the most part, convincing and occasionally inspired. There are some genuinely eerie sequences where the courtroom reality and the VR reconstruction bleed into each other-evidence morphing in real time, environmental details being “corrected” by the A.I., timelines compressing and looping in a way that makes you question what counts as objective truth.
In those moments, Mercy brushes against something genuinely frightening: not just the idea of being judged by an inhuman system, but of having your very memories remapped by it.
Where the film stumbles is in originality.
It’s impossible not to feel the shadow of better, more thematically robust works-Spielberg’s Minority Report most obviously.
The sense of precognition swapped for retroactive reconstruction, the sleek state tech, the moral questions about pre‑emptive or data‑driven justice: we’ve been here before, and with more philosophical bite.
Mercy reiterates the idea of A.I. in the judicial system-how easily efficiency becomes authority, how quickly human oversight erodes-but it doesn’t really deepen that conversation.
Instead, it mostly uses the concept as a high-stakes backdrop for a “Did he do it?” thriller.
To its credit, the film does deliver on tension.
The 90‑minute countdown structure keeps things moving, and there are enough misdirections and reveals that it isn’t entirely predictable. The way the A.I. cross-references physical evidence, surveillance feeds, biometric data, and inconsistencies in Pratt’s testimony creates several anxious stretches where the walls feel like they’re closing in. Even if the thematic groundwork is thin, the moment-to-moment suspense often works.
By the time the credits roll, Mercy feels like a solid, well‑packaged cyber-thriller that never quite becomes the incisive, unnerving masterpiece its premise hints at. It’s polished, entertaining, and intermittently thought‑provoking.
The tech is flashy, the execution competent, and Pratt’s committed turn keeps you engaged as his worst 24 hours are played back and dissected around him in stark, unforgiving VR.
It’s not a waste of 90 minutes, far from it, especially if you have an appetite for near‑future paranoia and slick A.I.-courtroom aesthetics. But it also doesn’t linger the way it could have.
Mercy will hold your attention, keep your pulse up, and maybe spark a conversation or two about A.I. and justice, but it stops just short of being the definitive film on that subject, content instead to borrow the best beats from earlier, sharper visions and remix them into a competent, if somewhat hollow, genre exercise.
Showing in cinemas from January 23.
-Dirk Lombard Fourie