Movie review
The camera is on.
The camera is everywhere in “Mercy.” Flying overhead in drones. Worn by the police as bodycams. Peeking forth from doorbells. Scanning streets. Peering into the rooms of private homes.
There’s no place it’s not present.
The camera is at the core of a seemingly seamless web of surveillance in which a Los Angeles cop played by Chris Pratt finds himself ensnared in this thriller directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Pratt’s character spends much of the picture strapped to a chair in a featureless room, desperately declaring his innocence.
The character, Chris Raven, is accused of killing his wife, and he’s on trial for his life. The judge is an artificial intelligence entity. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, she speaks with an eerily emotionless voice reminiscent of HAL 9000 from “2001.” She could be that notorious computer’s creepy daughter. Smiling a not-quite-human smile, she, like HAL, is imbued with the power of life and death.
The time is just a few years hence when an electronic AI system called Mercy has been created that dispenses swift, harsh justice. In capital cases, the accused is given 90 minutes to refute the charges. Failing that, the defendant is zapped at once in the chair of death.
The clock is ticking for officer Raven, and he is most unhappy. Claims he didn’t do the deadly deed, but evidence captured by those ever-present cameras sure makes it look like he did.
Tick, tick, tick.
Bekmambetov bombards the screen with a plethora of high-speed screenshots, whipping by at such velocity as to nearly induce sensory overload in the audience.
Zip, zip, zip.
Shouting and struggling, poor Pratt vainly tries to give his character dimension and some sense of sympathy. So genial and engaging in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” series, Pratt flails grouchily and ineffectively in “Mercy.”
Bekmambetov and screenwriter Marco van Belle seem to want to critique the growing intrusion of AI into society and to present a cautionary view of an age where personal privacy has been submerged in the welter of screens that surround us.
The relationship between Raven and Ferguson’s AI judge gradually evolves to the point where the AI begins to question its infallibility and starts to assist the cop in establishing his innocence. It becomes at that point something approaching human. Uh oh, HAL with a conscience.
The plot finds its footing when it turns into an Agatha Christie-style whodunit as Pratt’s cop searches for suspects and clues among those cascading images that may help him piece together who really killed his wife. The picture then morphs into a police procedural in which Raven enlists the help of a trusted fellow officer played by Kali Reis. The action moves throughout Los Angeles with Reis flitting over the landscape aboard a kind of quadcopter.
That, and of course the AI justice system, establishes the time of the movie as just slightly ahead of our own era, bordering on sci-fi but not quite.
The whole enterprise lapses into conventionality when Bekmambetov uncorks an elaborate car chase through the streets of L.A. with heaps of crashes and lots of gunplay. And — Sigh! — the futuristic aspect is chucked straight out the window when the picture concludes in a fistfight.
And thus does originality expire.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
