Official Discussion - Mercy [SPOILERS]

[theimpressivex@piefed.social]

Summary
In the near future, a detective stands on trial accused of murdering his wife. He has 90 minutes to prove his innocence to the advanced A.I. Judge he once championed, before it determines his fate.

Director
Timur Bekmambetov

Writer
Marco van Belle

Cast

• Chris Pratt
• Rebecca Ferguson
• Annabelle Wallis
• Kali Reis
• Kenneth Choi
• Manny Montana

Rotten Tomatoes: 22%

Metacritic: 37

[iww4@lemmy.zip]

Pratt’s track record deters me from seeing this, plus all the adds makes this look like a watered down Minority Report.

[lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de]

Not gonna lie, it was definitely an entertaining movie. Chris Pratt spends 95% of the movie in a chair trying to prove himself innocent in front of an AI judge. He's not presented as a likeable character and that's an interesting premise - he's a violent and drunk man who's disconnected from his family and you are not supposed to like him initially. The presentation is a bit like War of the Worlds (being mostly a one-room movie), but it's done in a much more competent way.

But this movie has very weird undertones. The police force is presented as an all-good entity with super-cool tech like flying drones and it's totally fine that an AI judge can just hack everyone's phones and get access to their private conversations, audios and videos or use the feed of your neighbors' bird feeding camera to see who drives around your house - and that's rarely addressed in a skeptical way. I only remember a short altercation between the father and his daughter, when he accessed a private conversation with her boyfriend and it's done like "Oh yeah, that was bad, but I need to defend myself" - "Alright then".

I did not see a "Sponsored by Palantir" part in the credits, but the movie feels like that should definitely be there.
Also, my local cinema only showed this in 3D and the effects are very weak and absolutely not worth it. They do things like putting up a circle in the middle of the screen and zoom in a bit (on flying drone footage) and that's it.

Near the end of the movie they also put in this overdone trope of a human convicing a machine with their feelings and the AI judge glitches and starts to feel bad for the family of the father, which didn't work for me at all. Really felt a bit like a propaganda action movie. But i still enjoyed it, it works for what they set it up to do.

Just one more note: I think when they started to produce this, we were still miles away from the current AI slop cycle and it was still new and exciting technology. This movie coming out in 2026 has already aged it poorly, because everyone hates AI now - and there just wasn't a lot of interest for it anymore. Only two other people in the cinema decided to watch this.