Mercy

Mercy Is it worth your time?

Mercy Review: A Fresh Concept That Almost Sticks the Landing

There are not a lot of movies that can make you feel genuinely tense while watching someone sit in a chair for ninety minutes. Mercy is one of them, at least for most of its runtime. Director Timur Bekmambetov has built a career out of doing things with a camera that most filmmakers would not dare try, and with Mercy he takes his Screenlife formula and pushes it into full blockbuster territory. The result is a movie with a genuinely interesting concept, two strong lead performances, and an ending that overstays its welcome by a meaningful stretch.

What Is Mercy About?

Set in 2029 Los Angeles, the film introduces a world where violent crime has spiraled so badly that the city has turned to artificial intelligence to overhaul its entire court system. The solution is Mercy Court, a process where accused defendants are strapped into what the film calls a Mercy Chair and given exactly 90 minutes to prove their innocence to an AI judge named Maddox, voiced and performed by Rebecca Ferguson. The system operates on a brutal assumption: you are guilty until proven innocent to 92% certainty. Fall short of that threshold and the sentence is death, carried out at the end of the 90-minute window.

Chris Pratt plays Detective Chris Raven, a cop who once championed the Mercy Court system and now finds himself sitting inside it, charged with murdering his wife Nicole. The film unfolds in real time, with a countdown clock visible in nearly every shot as Raven races to pull together evidence, identify who actually killed his wife, and convince an AI judge that he is telling the truth.

The Concept Is the Star

The best thing Mercy has going for it is the premise itself, and Bekmambetov is smart enough to let it breathe. The Screenlife format, where the story is told through screens, cameras, dashcam footage, and digital interfaces, has been used in smaller genre films before, but Mercy scales it up in a way that actually works. Every piece of evidence Raven introduces gets processed in real time on screen. Security footage, GPS data, financial records, text messages, and bodycam feeds all stack on top of each other as the case builds, and the film does a good job of making you feel like you are watching something genuinely new even when the underlying plot beats are familiar.

Critics have compared it to Minority Report and The Fugitive, and those comparisons are fair. A wrongfully accused man racing against a system designed to destroy him is not a new story. But the execution here gives it enough of a distinct identity that the familiarity does not kill the experience. The question of whether an AI judge can be manipulated, and who might have the motive and access to do so, keeps the middle section of the film moving with real momentum.

Chris Pratt Carries More Than Expected

Pratt is not exactly the obvious casting choice for a movie that requires him to spend most of his time strapped to a chair delivering everything through his face and voice. Audiences going in expecting the Star-Lord or Guardians version of him will need to adjust their expectations quickly. This role demands something quieter and more reactive, and Pratt largely delivers. The frustration, the fear, and the controlled desperation of a man who knows how the system works and still cannot find a way out of it come through in a performance that is more restrained than anything he has done in a franchise film.

Rebecca Ferguson as the AI judge Maddox is the other reason the film holds together as well as it does. It is a genuinely unusual role, playing a presence that is simultaneously all-seeing and emotionally unreadable, and Ferguson brings exactly the right quality to it. Audience viewers on Prime Video have consistently singled her out as the best part of the movie, and that tracks with what the film actually asks of her.

Where the Film Stumbles

The ending is where Mercy loses the thread, and it is worth being honest about that. Once Raven clears the central mystery of who killed his wife and why, the film should wrap up within a few minutes. Instead it keeps going, piling on an additional action sequence involving a truck, a bomb, a pursuit, and a finale that feels like it belongs to a different and louder movie than the tightly confined courtroom thriller that came before it.

The irony is that the film had earned its ending by that point. The revelation about the real killer, the connection to Mercy Court’s history, and the emotional logic of Raven’s situation all land well. But the movie does not trust that landing and keeps pushing. The result is a final act that dilutes the tension rather than paying it off. It is the one genuine complaint that consistently shows up across both critic and audience reviews, and it is legitimate.

The script also asks for a notable degree of suspended disbelief when it comes to some of the procedural logic. Several plot points only work if you agree not to pull too hard on any of the threads. For viewers who like their thrillers airtight, this will be a sticking point. For viewers who can accept that the whole enterprise is more fun than it is rigorous, the ride is enjoyable enough to get past it.

Final Thoughts

Mercy is the kind of movie that is more interesting than it is polished. The concept is genuinely fresh, or at least fresh enough that it does not feel like something you have watched a dozen times before. Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson both bring more to their roles than the script strictly requires, which gives the film a human core that keeps it watchable even when the logic starts to wobble. The ending runs too long and mistakes volume for impact, but everything that comes before it moves with enough tension and invention to make the overall experience worth your time.

If you are looking for a tightly plotted prestige thriller, this is not quite that. If you are looking for a high-concept, well-acted popcorn movie with something genuinely different to say about AI and the legal system, even if it does not say it perfectly, Mercy delivers.