If you had to endure 90 minutes of this garbage, you’d legalize summary executions too
Timur Bekmambetov, who still hasn’t paid for his previous crimes against cinema, returns with another movie told almost entirely through computer screens. Contrary to appearance, this production wasn’t made during the coronavirus quarantine, which one would assume based on the gimmick of having an actor strapped to a chair for the entire movie. One thing about its marketing campaign does work successfully, though: when you leave the theater, all you can say in your dulled stupor is the movie’s title: Mercy. Mercy. Please, have some mercy.
Mercy is set in a near-future Los Angeles where a rising crime wave has prompted law enforcement to adopt the genius solution of simply killing suspects quicker. The “Mercy Capital Court” is a 3D VR room where you’re presumed guilty from the start (strike 1 against basic constitutional principles). The tool you’re given to try to prove your innocence is a digital cloud with records of everything that citizens of Los Angeles do online: chats, photos, emails, phone calls, restaurant reservations, credit card transactions, gambling, you name it. Nothing is safe from the system’s unblinking eye (strike 2). Whatever information you find needs to convince a digital judge to lower its probabilistic assessment of your guilt. The trial is closed to the public and doesn’t use a jury or a defense lawyer (strike 3, claim your Big Brother T-shirt at the lobby). At the end of the 90 minutes, you’re either set free or executed instantly.
I guarantee there’s going to be a million YouTube videos titled “Real Lawyer Dissects Mercy.”
At the level of craft, Mercy is painful to watch. If you thought shaky cam was a problem, get ready for shaky cam when looking at a computer. Presumably to immerse the audience in the suspect’s point of view, the camera hops between the digital judge’s face and assorted floating screenshots of folders or maps or phone screens or police records, without letting the eye find an anchor to focus on.
The disorientation gets worse when the suspect starts pulling up pieces of evidence from the city’s omnipresent surveillance cameras: janky, jarry, low-framerate, low-resolution snippets of chases and fights that add a redundant level of nausea to the movie’s already distasteful premise. For the most part, the only times we get to see actors act is through closeups of Chris Pratt playing the accused and looking either very confused or very tired, and Rebecca Ferguson playing the digital judge and nervously suppressing her smile because she wasn’t supposed to laugh at the script.
At the level of theme, Mercy is downright evil. Note how the opening narration describes the crime wave worsening in intensity, as if it were the rain or the flu, a natural phenomenon causally unrelated to human choices. This is classic Calvinist rhetoric: humans are naturally rotten, ergo crime isn’t preventable. All that society can do is brace against it and punch back harder. At no point does the script show any curiosity about what caused this crime wave, what institutional failures the unrest is a response to. In this (not too) fictional future, the government’s response is to cordon entire areas of Los Angeles and shrug them off as basket cases. Anyone accused of something is thrown at the “Mercy Capital Court.”
A comparison will be useful here. In 2002, the film Minority Report presented another futuristic justice system that aspired to complete control over crime, and the system’s inherent flaws proved unfixable. That’s not what Mercy does. In Mercy, the invasive web of total surveillance is shown to be flawed as well, but the way the script addresses this is by doubling down on more total surveillance. Just like in Minority Report, the unfairly accused protagonist ends up uncovering a conspiracy to trick the system, but whereas Minority Report concluded that a system that is vulnerable to being tricked cannot be trusted to judge and sentence people, Mercy goes in the other direction, solving the defects of an invasive all-seeing government by relying more heavily on the invasive all-seeing government.
As a vision of the near future, Mercy couldn’t have come at a worse time. There’s a literal Nazi in the White House, unaccountable government goons are murdering civilians in the streets, the private sector is pushing for citizens to surrender even more of their privacy and autonomy, and here comes this shameless piece of copaganda about an AI-based regime of total control that works, and when challenged for its errors, comes out vindicated. So congratulations, Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve earned our rarest score for the second time. Now go to the corner and think about what you’ve done.
Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
