I enjoy a good action flick here and there but here I am once again to pick apart a movie for its flaws instead of just going for the ride. In Mercy we see the future of the justice system involving you and an AI judge sitting alone in a room where you have total access to all the world's systems, CCTV's, even clandestine government resources, to attempt to prove your innocence in a certain time limit.
It kind of goes against the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing but I guess Chris Pratt was looking for a payday.
Here's where I am going to be judgmental of this film right from the start. Do you recall that movie with Ice Cube called War of the Worlds where Cube spends basically the entire film just staring into a single camera and low budgets his way through an absolute atrocity of a film? Well this kind of does the same thing but not anywhere near as bad as that piece of crap. At least in Mercy, we aren't dealing with poorly made CGI alien walking machines.
Instead, we get a bunch of CCTV and fast acting computer stuff that I guess is supposed to dazzle us with the amount of information that is captured on various cameras at any given point of time. I suppose this isn't too terribly off the mark and I for one do not enjoy how much of all of our information is recorded.
Pratt, who I presume is paid the most out of everyone in this movie, spends almost the entire film strapped to a chair talking to a giant computer screen with an AI judge talking to him.
He has to go through all sorts of footage including door-cams, CCTV, email records of various people, shipping orders, body-cams, and anything else he can dream up in 90 minutes as he attempts to prove his innocence.
Some of it is interesting but if AI is that clever, they probably wouldn't need him to be the person that decides where to look nor would it be necessary for it to take a bunch of time. But I am getting ahead of myself here... This is a film and it wouldn't be very long if AI went as fast as it could.
The discovery of various betrayals as we progress is neat a guess, and the double crossing happens multiple times throughout but there the coincidental nature of all of these people being a part of something that nobody suspected until it was over seems a bit convenient for the plot. I'm not going to give the entire story away but Pratt (named "Raven" in the film - I'm not making this up), in order to be in this position in the first place, had to accidentally be black out drunk on a particular day in order to be framed for the murder that got him in the chair to start with. This is not a spoiler, it's in the trailer... but if we are to look at this from a logical point of view the possibility of this actually being the case at the exact day that the enemies planned to frame him... well, that seems a bit far-fetched to me.
The technological aspect of it all is kind of cool and the emotionless and incapable-of-being-biased AI judge is an interesting concept that is probably being worked on right now.
Some things that happen in the film that I'm going to nitpick is that "Raven" (god I hate that they named a character this) is able to call anyone he wants as part of his trial and every single person picks up the phone, many of which didn't even know he was on trial.
I want you to look at the people you contact the most in your friends list and think to yourself, would they answer if I called? I know most of mine wouldn't and vice versa. Everyone also picks up in video mode.. Maybe i'm just behind the times but I rarely answer phone calls and never do from unknown numbers and if I did do that, it wouldn't be in video mode. It's a film! It's a film! I know!
The mood is kept a bit tense but it is also kind of predicatable that we are going to come down to the absolute last minute before things get resolved and in that regard this is just a Jason Statham movie that happens to not have Statham in it.
They didn't go full sci-fi on this one but apparently they had $20 million or so that they are contractually obligated to spend on unnecessary CGI because all the other vehicles are modern-day-now but police have flying motorbikes now... great.
It probably seems like I am tearing this one a new one but that's not entirely true. I was entertained the entire way through even though a lot of what happens is extremely far-fetched. Also, I felt compelled to see this one because the professional critics are still apparently obligated to tear apart anything and everything that Pratt does because he outed himself as a conservative Christian a few years ago. The difference in audience vs critic score reflects this.
None of these reviews can be trusted though because once Pratt became a sort of political figure against his will, and even though he never once made himself a spotlight for anything political, a lot of the "I love this perfect awesome film" reviews are almost certainly fake as well. Once again, on RT I am not allowed to choose to look at the score distribution so I just presume the 1's and 10's, which are likely most of them, are all fake or politically-motivated, which is really stupid.
Should I watch it?
This is a tough one. I don't think this film is great nor do I think it is bad. I do think the reviews of it cannot be trusted because of Chris' accidental political affiliation. The professional media hates him and give bad marks to anything he is in. The audience score has almost certainly been compromised as well and the people who run those sites are complicit in it.
Now, this movie DOES require your attention unlike other entertaining action films such as Rock or Statham films. If you casually watch this while doing other things you will be lost. There are probably only about 10 central characters in this film but you kind of need to know all of them to understand what the hell is going on. You won't see the ending coming and this is good but I suppose it is a matter of perspective and opinion about whether or not you will actually care.
At the moment there is nowhere you can stream this as part of a subscription. It is still in very few theaters and is available to rent or buy on a wide variety of services including Amazon, Apple, and Fandango
