Mercy

A detective is put on trial for his wife's murder by the very AI justice system he championed, and now he must use that system to prove his innocence before his time runs out...

Failing to make back even its $60 million dollar budget, Mercy was a flop at the box office, so much so that reportedly Chris Pratt had a bit of a crash-out over it. And maybe he was right to. After all, between the reception of this film, and the wet fart that was The Electric State, it’s starting to look like we’ve entered an era where Chris Pratt must finally begin to reckon with the damage his weirdo anti-vax Christian evangelical asshole bullshit has done to his career, especially now that the MCU bubble can no longer be relied upon to give him a cushion. Because the simple truth is, it seems like the general audience has soured on Chris Pratt.

But why though?

Well, at a certain point, he just started to give off this vibe that he kind of sucks. It was vague at first, but it's been getting stronger for awhile now. It's that feeling of flinching away when you get a whiff of something rotting. It's something you sense during his interviews, or from his public actions, especially as he ages, as the sheen of youthful goofballness begins to congeal into the pale doughy complicity of white centrism, as his mischievous little grin hardens into the razor-edged smile of a humorless surburbanite who thinks those darn kids down the street enjoying themselves are being way too loud.

Now, is it fair to say that a possibly large portion of this audience-souring can be traced back to the moment when Starlord—in his grief over learning of Gamora’s death due to Thanos retrieving the Soul Stone–ended up being the reason for why Thanos was not subdued in Avengers: Infinity War, directly leading to the (to be fair, temporary) death of Spider-man, and that this coincidentally happened at exactly the wrong time when public perception of Pratt was already beginning to shift, and as a result, some of that blame then transferred from Starlord to Pratt?

Possibly, sure. At the very least, it certainly didn’t help any.

But that aside, it's undeniable, somewhere around the time that Pratt divorced Anna Faris to marry the human equivalent of a Williams and Sonoma catalogue, something defintely shifted in his public perception. Dubbed the ”Worst Chris” by the internet in a poll between him, Chris Helmsworth, Chris Pine, and Chris Evans, Pratt is basically one of those celebs who’s stumbled in the public eye one too many times, and each time he did, he also gave the world a very quick glimpse behind the charismatic curtain, and revealed that he actually kind of sucks. That kind of shit is cumulative in the public eye. So you take all that, then you add to it all of the many instances where it has been heavily imply that he's a weirdo Christian prick, and an Anti-vaxxer asshole to boot, as well as a "it's just common sense, but then I'm just a small town guy" kind of Midwestern conservative asshole, on top of him being an insensitive douchebag for a variety of other reasons, and after awhile, the answer becomes undeniably apparent... Chris Pratt kind of sucks as a person.

Personally, in my opinion, the main reason Chris Pratt is the worst Chris—the most revealing thing about him as a person—is the fact he once tried to re-home his aging cat on Twitter because she was old and difficult to care for. What a fucking asshole.

So, yeah, he’s the Worst Chris.

As a result of all this, and with his only real success lately being that Navy SEAL show—besides being the voice of Mario, of course, although that doesn’t seem like something that can really be fairly attributed to him—it seems a safe bet to say that in a few years, the only time you’re gonna see Chris Pratt is in Hallmark Christmas movies where he plays the asshole townie, or in those weirdo Christian action films about god-fearing Special Forces Operators killing brown people around the world for God and America, or, if he’s lucky, in whatever the latest Yellowstone spinoff is, where he'll probably play a gruff old fashioned patriarch in a family of god-fearing salt-o’-the-earth ranchers, who stand against Corporate Suits, Liberal Elitists from the Big City, and Mexican Cartels. Lo, how the mighty have fallen, right? But don’t feel too bad for him, garbage media loves it when a big fish splashes down in their stagnant little pond, so he'll get a nice check in his little hell of white supremacy and christian nationalism. Besides, like I said, this is his own fault. You ride the horse you saddle, right?

Anyway, Mercy is a science fiction thriller film directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who made the Russian urban fantasy films Night Watch and Day Watch, based on Sergei Lukyanenko's novels, about a secret war between the supernatural forces of Light and Darkness in modern day Moscow, which I loved. And then he directed a handful of crappy American action films that I did not. He’s what you would call a director of diminishing returns. In keeping with that, here he is now with Mercy, a dystopian white flight crime-panic movie all about the “wonders” of AI and the “horrors” of a “good” cop getting caught in the very monstrous system that they regularly brutalize citizens in the name of.

So my question is… will this film be self-aware?

Place your bets.

The year is 2029. The world is in trouble. The city is Los Angeles. It is an urban no-go zone hellscape burning to the ground.

The Mercy Capital Court has been set up as a response to the escalating surge in crime in Los Angeles, but not to help to devote resources and stability to support these under-resourced commuities, not to aid in providing people living in poverty with free and consistent quality medical and psychiatric care, but to utilize new AI judges to quickly try defendants for violent offenses. In addition, un order for these AI courts to gather evidence for these cases, citizens are now required to surrender their right to privacy and register their electronic devices to the city cloud, where they are recorded at all times without their consent. Defendants are now strapped to a chair in an AI courtroom, and the AI judge gives them access to the city cloud, so the Defendants can then find any evidence proving their innocence. Should they fail to do so within 90 minutes, they are executed via a sonic blast.

What the defendants are not provided with, of course, is a lawyer…

This set-up immediately becomes a bad thing once it happens to a white guy, who is also a cop. Los Angeles Police Department Detective Christopher "Chris" Raven, once the poster boy for the AI court, awakens to find himself strapped to the chair, hungover, confused, and about to be put on trial for his wife’s murder.

He has no memory of what happened or how he got here...

Presiding over his case is an AI human simulacrum that has been dubbed Judge Maddox. Unfortunately for Detective Raven, all the evidence points to him having killed his wife, as her blood was found on his clothing, and doorbell camera footage places him at their home shortly before her murder, and also because something like 40% of cops beat their wives, so… As Detective Raven is a well-known drunk, whose wife was cheating on him with a cater-waiter, the AI human simulacrum rates Detective Raven’s probability of guilt at 97.5%, which is more than enough to qualify him for execution. In order to avoid this, Detective Raven needs to lower his guilt rating to 92%. He now has 90 minutes to scroll the internet and provide enough reasonable doubt to get rid of that 5.5%.

What follows is a pretty typical action movie, but all from the perspective of the “Guy In The Chair” instead of the actual action hero, as Detective Raven directs his partner Jacqueline "Jaq" Diallo around the city. Most of the time, she rides one of the awesome quad-copter bikes, but like, the shitty police version. Together, the pair shuffle through a series of red herrings, dead-ends, and suprise reveals about Detective Raven's shitty little life, as they try to unravel the "mystery" behind the murder of his wife, including them discovering that someone has been phrogging in Detective Raven’s house–which is the nightmare fuel idea that someone could be secretly living in your home without your knowledge right now. This all leads to a ludicrous kidnapping/car chase/wrestling match as the climax… again, mostly from the perspective of the “Guy In The Chair.”

In the end, almost the entire 90 minutes is used up before Detective Raven is freed, and he and his new best friend, the AI human simulacrum, are forced to not only confront the fact that some cops really are bad apples, but that a few mistakes have been made by both humans and AI with this new AI court room idea, possibly leading a few deaths, for which they're really sorry about, but not enough to make them think that maybe they should tear down the whole system.

The End

Seeing that this movie is about a cop, who backed an unfair system, and who then finds themself trapped in that very system, it would be fair for you to assume that the premise of this film would basically be the "I never thought the leopards would eat MY face, sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party” meme, but instead it's actually a vindication of the very assholes who are causing all the harm in the world, and a justification for the system they kill to support.

In a nutshell, Mercy is centered on a Hitchcockian-esque idea of a man finding himself accused of committing a crime he doesn’t remember committing, despite all the evidence indicating that they are in fact guilty, all presented basically in real time, but y’know… aimed for the CBS police procedural crowd. That the whole film feels weirdly out-of-touch is maybe the nicest thing that you can say about a movie that acts like the Anarchist’s Cookbook is this unknown and extremely dangerous underground thing, a secret compendium of dark knowledge beloved of homicidal maniacs and anti-american terrorists, instead of what it actually is, nothing but a silly little novelty item boogeyman from the era of Satanic Panics, the book version of going to get sushi and not paying. But then, this is also a movie where the wrongly accused super-cop hero manages to break the computer, not by asking it to define love, like Captain Kirk, but by asking it to trust his super cop guts, "trust me, bro" which then turns out to be 100% right, allowing him to stop a terrorist on a rampage.

So, the fact that it's stupid and obvious tracks.

Which also maybe explains why the film feels so overly familiar too. Should you watch it, and I don’t think you should, you’ll notice echoes of films like Minority Report and The Fugitive, with a protagonist being wrongfully accused of murder, or RoboCop, with a protagonist who’s situation is the result of manipulation by the very system they’ve sworn to protect, or even the recent John Cho film, Searching (which was produced by director, Timur Bekmambetov), where the hero searches for his daughter's using social media, who is also suspected in a murder case, just to name a few of the cribbed ideas you can spot. Mercy is basically a mediocre local cover band. Nothing too surprising. Nothing too shocking. Nothing too hard to get. Nothing very well done. But comforting enough in its familiarity at least.

I did appreciate how the film is possibly set in an alternate universe of the tv show Parks & Rec though, as an alternate version of Perd Hapley plays the newscaster.

But in the end, despite the fact that a reasonable person might expect, given the set-up, that this film will be a rebuke of modern day policing, of surveillance states, and of an over-reliance on AI, the fact that this film is nothing but straight-up idiot propaganda in support of it makes it too hard to enjoy. That this is actually a story where good cops are ultimately vidicated, where the system works if you deserve it, only guilty people run, AI can think for itself and do magic (even if it does make a mistake here and there), is abhorrent. The fact that this film is so dumb and boring is in no way a vindication for us, but is instead a terrible glimpse into why this ugly way of thinking is so popular to begin with.

Mercy is a film that in essense says... if you get in the way of the white cop doing whatever the fuck they want/need to do, then whatever happens to you as a result is your fault because you clearly hate America, because if you had just been smart, let the white guy cop do what they wanted/needed to do, and stayed out of their way, then everything would've been fine, because he's the authority, he knows, and he's right. After all, the only crooked cop in this film was the Black lady cop.

So yeah, if you're still wondering why the world seems to have turned on Chris Pratt, it’s because movies like Mercy are the type of projects he has chosen to make ever since he became enough of a star to be able to pick and choose his own films. The world has turned on him, because this film seems to reflect his worldview.

I mean... where was Chris Pratt on Jan 6th?

But all that having been said, those quad-copter bikes are pretty cool.