Mercy
How do you feel about watching somebody else play video games?
Mercy (2026)
2 / 5
Mercy is a movie-length exercise in watching somebody else play a first-person shooter. That’s a problem for me, because I get motion sick when I try to watch somebody play a first-person shooter; the action on the screen is juking around randomly in ways I’m not controlling. I’m fine in cars and planes and boats or whatever, but when my field of vision is filled with uncontrollably jerking and jumping images, dizziness and nausea follow for me.
That’s kind of a shame here, because Chris Pratt is always watchable, and the central conceit is a solid dystopian sci-fi idea: a new AI court has been created to expedite the execution of the guilty-until-proven-innocent, but the accused has full access to every phone, computer, camera, digital archive, and other electronic doodad registered on the public super-network which he can access to try and build his defense. He has 90 minutes to convince the algorithm he’s less than 92% likely to be guilty, or the detention chair he’s in will kill him. Which brings us to the AI judge, which initially feels really wrong, but has tasty (if chilling) undertones. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, a seemingly odd choice for an LA virtual judge, virtual “Judge Maddox” (implying there will eventually be more of these AI judges) feels really unevenly written, but as the dialogue continues there’s a really trippy vibe to be found: the AI wants to be the helpful, tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear AI that we all like to mock, but has clearly been instructed to try and be a judge instead, but its baseline keeps bleeding through in odd ways. Like this whole system isn’t entirely up to par. Think for a moment about the idea of the LA City Council deciding to write a page of “judge” instructions for an off-the-shelf LLM. That’s the Mercy Court. That doesn’t sound all that far fetched, really, and that makes it terrifying.
However, the real problem is that Pratt’s defendant, literally “Chris”, surfs and sifts and searches mountains of data as he frantically attempts to defend himself. Windows and pictures and sound snippets whiz and spin and zoom and fly all over the place for most of the movie’s runtime.
I physically couldn’t keep watching it (and it hit theaters with a Real 3D option–I can’t even imagine). I had to watch a smaller corner of the screen and try and just listen to the dialogue, because facing the movie straight-on was vertiginous. That’s a shame, because there’s probably a thought-provoking watch in here, but it is what it is. Be ye warned.
2 stars of 5: I can’t recommend a movie that I can’t physically watch, but if you can stomach the kaleidoscopic action you probably won’t regret it. Probably.