Final Verdict: 🍿🍿½ (2.5 Buckets of Popcorn)
Mercy is one of those movies you walk into with absolutely zero expectations and somehow leave both pleasantly surprised and mildly annoyed at the same time. It stars Chris Pratt as a man accused of murdering his wife who has 90 minutes to prove his innocence in front of an AI judge played by Rebecca Ferguson. If he fails, well… let’s just say Yelp does not cover appeals.
To the film’s credit, it wastes no time. Mercy throws you directly into its central dilemma and never really lets up. The pacing is tight, the clock is always ticking, and for a good stretch of its runtime, it works. It plays like a late night cable thriller that accidentally got a decent budget and a couple of movie stars.
Chris Pratt does solid work here, dialing things back from his usual charm machine mode and leaning more into desperation and restraint. But the real standout is Rebecca Ferguson. Playing an emotionless AI judge sounds like it could be stiff or dull, yet she manages to make every line feel precise, intimidating, and oddly hypnotic. She carries an unsettling calm that keeps the tension alive even when the script starts wobbling.
Conceptually, Mercy flirts with some genuinely interesting ideas. A justice system run by an all-seeing algorithm that casually violates every privacy law ever written is a fun nightmare to sit with. The film even uses its visual tech in clever ways, including some surprisingly effective 3D that actually adds immersion instead of just throwing things at your face like it is 2009 again.
Here is where things start to crack. The story is riddled with plot holes that are hard to ignore once you notice them. For a film built around an AI that supposedly knows everything, there are moments where it feels like it conveniently knows nothing just so the movie can happen. On top of that, the mystery is so transparent that you will likely guess the outcome before the movie even pretends to hide it.
And then there is the third act.
Mercy spends most of its runtime acting like a grounded, tech driven thriller and then suddenly decides it wants to be something else entirely. The shift is so over the top it feels like the movie walked into a different genre without telling anyone. What started as a tense race against time turns into a sequence that made me quietly ask, in a very Austin way, “Wait… are we really doing this right now?”
In the end, Mercy is watchable, occasionally gripping, and frustratingly close to being something better. It’s a decent one-time thriller with a strong central performance and a great premise, but I doubt I’ll re-watch it.
Not bad. Just not the movie it could have been.
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