RIOTUS

DrewNotes: the future of justice is in the hands of AI. If you can’t prove you’re innocent, the only “mercy” you can expect is a quick execution.

You wake up locked into a chair, hearing the last parts of a commercial/orientation video. The video helpfully explains that, due to social collapse and skyrocketing crime, the city of Los Angeles has pioneered “Mercy Court.” Defendants with a 92% or greater likelihood of guilt have ninety minutes to prove their innocence or they will be executed—no appeal, no stays, no last minute call from the governor. Defendants have the resources of the AI judge, which are limitless in cyberspace, to get that estimate below 92%.

So far, nobody has.

Police detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up in the chair. He is hung over and defiant, until he’s told that he’s charged with murdering his wife. An early public proponent of Mercy Court, Raven is ironically on trial in the system he championed. First raging at and then grudgingly cooperating with the AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), he must use social media, CCTV footage, video taken from neighbors’ and business security cameras, phone logs, and more to find out who killed his wife and why.

It doesn’t help that all the available evidence points to his guilt.

But Raven, despite being an angry fallen-off-the-wagon alcoholic (his own sponsor Rob—played by Chris Sullivan—is brutally disappointed when that truth comes out), is a capable detective. He begins to find small clues in the video taken at his weekend barbecue and by his daughter on her secret social media account. Who was his wife texting at the barbecue? What was she investigating at her company and could it have led to her murder? With help from his partner Jaq Diallo (Kali Reis), Raven pieces together a mystery even as the clock runs down.

The evidence he turns up isn’t promising. Suggestions of violence, domestic abuse, and blackout alcoholism turn up, for which he has no excuses. Maddox prods him to continue searching for facts, however, and he finds the resolve to see it through… when he realizes that something has been under his nose this whole time. Something doesn’t add up—and now that he’s figured it out, there’s a whole other countdown he has to stop, even if it costs him his life.

The movie, directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) and written by Marco van Belle (Arthur and Merlin), is an effective mystery with some sharp late-stage twists. Raven is not an empathetic figure; Pratt does perhaps his best work here, veering away from his light comedic persona in digging into a life built on lies and mistakes. His rages stem from the brutal death of his partner Ray (Kenneth Choi) and the fracturing of his marriage to Nicole (Annabelle Wallis), leaving him unprepared to defend his life. And for once (recently anyway), Pratt is literally “the guy in the chair,” quarterbacking others in this investigation rather than doing the action work himself. It’s an interesting change of pace.

Ferguson is a great foil for Pratt’s “gut hunch” detective work, steadily insisting on facts and following the clues where they lead. Set up to be an antagonist, her character shows surprising depth and even compassion as she steers Raven from one pile of information to the next, helping him focus on finding that needle in the haystack.

Sullivan and Reis are also terrific as Rob the sponsor (who works at Nicole’s company) and Jaq, who spends most of the movie on a giant-size drone “quadcopter” flying to track down Raven’s leads. They both get strong, compelling moments in the movie, especially as buried truths come to light late in the game.

Bekmambetov’s visual style is a great fit here. The “goldfish bowl” nature of the trial, where screen captures and browser windows race by in a holographic blur, is an apt metaphor for the information overload in our society. There’s no real attention paid to this, or to the horrifying implications of a justice system that will pry into private parts of cyberspace without due process (although the Judge handwaves quite a bit of this away as “official business,” it would be a legal nightmare), but the movie is a mystery thriller, not a social media documentary/thinkpiece. It’s just something to be aware of when watching the film. Or to discuss afterward.

The movie does, however, deal with the idea that justice—whether human or AI—can and will make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are not accidental. But accidental or not, they become part of the foundation upon which justice is done, and mistakes can’t be taken back when the stakes are life and death in ninety minutes. The risks of handing our lives over to AI, in this case very literally, are not downplayed here.

Extending that theme, the movie is also an indictment of the death penalty, since this is a real-world example of when a mistake can’t be undone. It’s not explicit but it’s there.

Mercy is a solid, effective, enjoyable action movie set in a plausible near-future. God forbid we ever end up depending on the mercy of artificial intelligence.