YNOT at the Movies

If you wonder what AI might become in three years, here is a glimpse of it in the justice system. "Mercy" (USA/Russia 2026 | 100 min.) takes that anxiety and inflates it into a glossy, self-serious thriller that wants to feel urgent and provocative, yet rarely earns either. Set in 2029 where algorithms have replaced human judges, the film imagines a court system that tries, convicts or exonerates, and executes if convicted, all while claiming emotional neutrality with machine precision in a speedy manner. It is a premise loaded with moral landmines, but the movie approaches them less as questions to explore than as bullet points to flash on screen.

The story centers on Los Angeles detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt), who wakes up strapped into the Mercy Chair, accused of murdering his wife and given 90 minutes to prove his innocence before the AI judge, Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), reaches a final verdict. Raven is assumed guilty from the start, forced to argue against an ever-rising probability meter fed by omnipresent surveillance footage, body cams, phone records, and social media data. As the trial unfolds, he attempts to reconstruct the missing hours of his memory while appealing to the cold logic of a system that claims to value facts over feelings. In theory, this setup should generate mounting dread. In practice, it mostly highlights how little agency the film gives its protagonist. Chris Pratt spends the majority of the runtime literally locked in place, reacting to screens and disembodied voices, with scant opportunity to shape the drama or reveal anything new about his character.

The film leans hard into director Timur Bekmambetov's screenlife language, filling the frame with overlapping windows, scrolling data, and digital overlays that never let the viewer's eye rest. At first, the design has a sleek, controlled rhythm, echoing the film's obsession with systems and efficiency. But the constant visual noise soon becomes numbing, less a storytelling tool than a stylistic reflex. Like an endlessly animated slideshow, the movie confuses motion with momentum, assuming that more information on screen automatically means higher stakes.

As the plot progresses, logic gives way to narrative desperation. Revelations arrive not because the story has earned them, but because it needs to keep escalating. The eventual explanation of the crime's motive strains credibility to the breaking point, tipping the film from implausible into outright preposterous. Twists are piled on with such force that they feel less like organic turns and more like emergency patches applied to a script riddled with holes. For a film so invested in the rhetoric of rationality and data-driven truth, this movie is surprisingly indifferent to coherence.

The film's themes about AI ethics and surveillance are timely, but they are treated superficially, gestured at rather than interrogated. Maddox, the AI judge, is framed as morally complex, yet the movie never fully commits to exploring that ambiguity. Instead, it relies on familiar warnings about technology run amok without adding much insight to the conversation. By the end, "Mercy" feels less like a cautionary tale than a hollow demonstration of its own concept.

Despite the push to experience the film in IMAX and 3D, there is little here that benefits from that scale. The spectacle is largely confined to screens within screens, and the emotional impact remains flat regardless of format. Stripped of its marketing gloss, this film plays like a middling streaming thriller, the kind of movie that fades into background noise while your attention drifts elsewhere. For a film obsessed with the future of justice, it delivers a verdict that feels rushed, overdesigned, and ultimately unsatisfying.

"Mercy" opens in theaters on Friday, January 23, 2026.