Film Review: Mercy

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.

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...

In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:

… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.

Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.

In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.

Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.

Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.

The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.

This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The Six Weirdest Post-Apocalyptic Movies New(ish) to Netflix Instant Streaming

Casting around for something good to watch on Netflix Instant, but can't decide between two equally horrible-sounding choices? Here are my mini-reviews of six of Netflix's stranger offerings--the good, the bad, and the poopy! If even these mini-reviews are too long, skip to the Too Long, Didn't Read one-word summations at the end!

Goodbye World (2013): More like 'goodbye 100 minutes I'll never get back.' A bunch of charisma-less, infuriatingly annoying eggheads happen to be vacationing in a solar-powered, well-stocked cottage when The End of Civilization comes. Pretty much all the couples' relationships unravel, or I should say finish unraveling, before they so much as meet their first serious challenge. It's a movie about shockingly unlikeable characters who do nothing but talk talk talk--that and make shockingly selfish decisions. It's enough to make one start to wish they'd all get hit by a meteor or something...

TLDR: Yuck.

Day Watch (2006): It's not really new to Netflix, nor is it a post-apocalyptic movie so much as a sort of 'ongoing threat of looming apocalypse' movie, but that's good enough for Nerd work! This sequel to Timur Bekmambetov's 2004 Night Watch, itself a pretty entertaining ride, felt far superior to that maiden effort. The comic touch, as well as the romance of regret (the all-important quest to unmake the critical Bad Mistake that started the whole mess in the first place), are finely done, and everything from the dialogue (or its subtitles, in any case) to the character development feel more convincing here than in Night Watch.

TLDR: отлично! ('excellent')

Kill Zombie! (2011): a spirited Dutch attempt to capture the magic of Shaun of the Dead, it's amusing enough, and it's got some interesting comic twists, but overall it feels very derivative, and—to put it kindly—the lead actor is hardly of Simon Pegg caliber (or "calibre" for all you zany British spellers out there!).

TLDR: Middelmatig ('Meh').

After the Dark (2013): What a weird, irritatingly inconsistent movie! It's got plenty of eye candy in the lush visuals of nuclear apocalypse and so forth, and the thought experiment of visualizing a thought experiment,if you will,  was interesting, but it's thoroughly sunk by a stupid love triangle angle and a leading lady utterly lacking in charisma. Plus, why Indonesia? And who made a bunch of entitled expatriates the masters of the universe, anyway? If someone told me, "Quick! You can only save ten people from among these twenty snotty whiners...who will it be?", the choice would be easy—I'd save none of them. I'd rather spend a year utterly alone than have to endure any one of them, especially in the feel-good hippie version.

TLDR: Argh!

It's a Disaster (2012): It's anything but! David Cross has never been funnier, including in Arrested Development, and the ending is to die for, as is the delicious uncertainty that the apocalypse has come at all! Structurally, it's very similar to Goodbye World (see above), but it keeps the relational dysfunction at the center of the comedy rather than trying to be all serious about something as potentially hilarious as The End. Overall, It's a Disaster is one of the funniest movies, bar none, I've seen in a good long while.

TLDR: Hilarious!

Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (2011): Wow. Just...wow. A major bummer. This movie is doubtless a dream come true for all you lovers of toilet humor, poop, and generally bum-centered humor/horror. For the rest of us...

TLDR: 糞 ('Crap')

Next up: Bounty Killer (2013), a post-corpapocalypse movie about which I've heard good-ish things (though the stupid poster gives me pause). In fact, I think I'll go watch it right now...

TLDR: Unknown! 

This has been a public service announcement of what's loopy and what's poopy in Netflix Instant streaming's rather uneven selection of post-apocalyptic movies, brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f lover and crap-hater here at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.