It’s a classic film noir set-up with just a dash of Hitchcock. A Los Angeles man in the near future awakens from a drunken binge to find that he’s being accused of murder. And not just any murder. No, he’s stabbed his wife a couple of years into a rough patch in their marriage. To make it just a little more interesting, he can’t remember the salient time thanks to the ci-mentioned binge and the sharp blow to his head he received as he was being arrested in a bar. Wait, let’s make him a police detective, too. One with anger management issues. Thus does MERCY lay out its premise.
This being the 21st century, however, there is a twist, and in a 21st century where dependence on and fear of AI creeps competes with a pronounced paranoia about uncheckable lawlessness, we are gifted a great one. A new initiative called the Mercy Court will try our man, Chris Raven (Chris Pratt). The judge will be an AI program named Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) whose logic is impeccable, and Chris will have 90 minutes to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt or be executed on the spot. Yep, it’s summary justice instituted by a local government desperate to placate a scared public. With a few guardrails in place such as a statistical probability that a defendant is guilty before being sent to Mercy Court, everyone who needs to can feel good about swift justice not making any mistakes.
As for Chris, he may be shackled to a chair, he may not have attorney representation, but he is given access to every digital file in the cloud that he thinks might help his case. And no quarter given for the stress he might be feeling with that digital clock in his face ticking down the last minutes of his life, because so far every defendant in Mercy Court has been found guilty, and with the violent crime rate down 80% or so as a result, it’s an initiative that’s not going away anytime soon.
Set a mere three years in the future, Los Angeles, the landscape is familiar, aside from that nifty hovercycle that Chris’ partner, Jaq (Kali Reis) uses to zip around Los Angeles following the clues and hunches Chris has about who else might have committed the crime. While Jaq is following leads outside, Chris is enjoying nifty immersive experiences as crime scenes are recreated and backyard barbeques replay all around him. As for Maddox, she presides from a giant screen with a timer in one corner showing Chris how much time he has left. Ferguson, reduced to only head and shoulders, does more than merely show off her astounding bone structure. Maddox may be programmed to stick to the impersonality of sticking to the facts, but the interface that makes her amenable to humans allows the actress to convey the inklings of what may or may not be a budding sense of self-awareness as Chris provides the classic gut-versus-logic style of investigation. Meanwhile, Jaq is also sticking to facts, as in promising her partner that she will follow wherever the clues lead, even if it is to prove Chris’ guilt. Further meanwhile, Chris’ 16-year-old daughter, Britt (Kylie Rogers), traumatized by finding her mother’s body, is struggling with the further trauma of her father being blamed for the crime and, hence, less that forthcoming with helping the case.
Pratt is a terrific everyman, even with the limitations of acting while seated and immobile, going from a guy who punches out ring cameras to one agonizing his way through regret and recriminations and revelations that arise out his trip down memory lane to solve his wife’s (Annabelle Wallis) murder. You understand why people who think he’s guilty still want to help him, even if it’s a losing battle. You also understand why his outbursts of anger after his own on-the-job trauma might make those same people doubt his innocence.
The biggest gimmick is having the action take place in real time to enhance nice sense of urgency. It makes for a film that is streamlined lean and mean narratively, with every delay from chasing down suspects, to getting someone on the phone, to Chris having to stop and think as he ponders the array of possibilities and suspects adding to the tension. Just when you think that everything is resolved, all hell breaks loose with a twist that keeps twisting right to the very last second and then some. No spoilers, but the final chase through Los Angeles seen from several different perspectives as a vehicle with nothing to lose barrels through and over any and all obstacles is a thing of wonder and angst.
Yes, there are more than a few convenient coincidences, but what we have here is a clever entertainment with a pointed, ahem, stab at the way mob mentality infects even those who believe in equal protection under the law. Well-paced, nicely realized, and played to the hilt by a great cast, MERCY does an excellent job of scattering red herrings while delivering an adrenaline rush.
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