Most even casual moviegoers are probably already familiar with the Screenlife subgenre, but for those who aren’t hip to the terminology, it’s made up of those horror and thriller films where the story is told primarily or even entirely from the perspective of someone watching and using a computer or phone, sometimes including security or dashcam footage. Think movies like Unfriended or Dashcam, or the very recently notorious War of the Worlds thing with Ice Cube. Despite the lackluster spate of lazy iterations, some of these projects are quite good. One of the subgenre’s primary proponents and earliest adopters is the Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, who has produced a couple of these already, and his latest film, Mercy, reflects of a sort hybrid waypoint between Screenlife and action film.
It’s the near future, and Los Angeles has implemented something called Mercy Court. If someone is charged with a violent crime, they’re restrained to a chair, placed in front of an AI judge, and given complete access to any and all evidence and investigative tools. They’ve got 90 minutes to exonerate themselves, or else they’ll be summarily executed via sonic blast. In the case of our film here, LAPD Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt), a vocal proponent of the Mercy Court shtick, finds himself accused of murdering his wife. He’s subsequently placed before AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), and the clock starts. If you hear that setup and think it sounds like a dipshit Minority Report knockoff, well, you’re not entirely wrong.
So let’s be clear: Mercy is a deeply stupid movie. It has absolutely nothing to say about timely subjects like Artificial Intelligence, law enforcement, Internet privacy, or ubiquitous surveillance tech. Instead, it exists primarily as a genuinely virtuosic experiment in smashing all of its visual cues — security footage, websites, dashcam and bodycam POV, etc. — into a mélange of whip pans, jump cuts, and snap zooms. The effect is initially pretty exciting and reminds of Bekmambetov at this best, but 90 straight minutes of this approach quickly becomes enervating. It’s also perhaps ill-advised that there’s a countdown clock on Raven’s imminent execution displayed in almost every single shot, which does less to amass tension than it does to make the viewer crushingly aware of how much time is left in the almost defiantly dumb proceedings.
That said, the actual technique employed here is pretty ingenious, even if it wears out its welcome quickly. The narrative momentum never really slows down, and the constant digital stimulus of cascading waves of footage and exposition is pretty seamlessly delivered. An unsurprising byproduct of this emphasis on technical aplomb is that the script and performances are so utterly arbitrary that they barely merit mention, but as an example of a very specific form, Mercy offers pretty fascinating stuff, simultaneously stretching the subgenre to its limits and completely playing it out into irrelevance. It has the effect of lending an almost DIY exuberance to the whole thing, despite what’s clearing a decent budget propping the project up. Mercy is complete junk, there’s no way around it, but if you tune into the very specific wavelength and have a tolerance for wholesale idiocy, there’s at least a genuine experience to be had here, which is a small balm for the otherwise too anonymous and homogenous blockbuster landscape of the present.
DIRECTOR: Timur Bekmambetov; CAST: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: January 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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