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By John Serba
Published March 22, 2026, 6:00 p.m. ET
The screenlife subgenre is officially enshittified thanks to Mercy (now on Amazon Prime Video), an empty-skulled thriller that gives us the deeply unstimulating pleasure of watching Chris Pratt sit in a chair for 90 minutes, talking to an AI bot played by Rebecca Ferguson. Furthering the headscratching nature of this project, it’s the new directorial effort by Timur Bekmambetov, whose career has curiously shifted from admirably OTT stylized action films (Night Watch, Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) to producing and/or directing screenlife movies – his name turns up in the credits of Unfriended, Profile and last year’s highly ridiculed Ice Cube-led Amazon commercial War of the Worlds – which play out primarily on computer and phone screens. As Mercy sort of accidentally and/or unwittingly implies that a society in the grip of dystopian technology maybe ain’t so bad, all we can do is wonder why anyone would want to watch a movie that’s the equivalent of compulsively hopping from app to app on your phone fruitlessly searching for something, anything, to entertain your brain.
MERCY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: It’s 2029, and Los Angeles is a hellhole of, um, homeless people? Being shoved into camps and beat up by cops? It’s enough of a problem that the LAPD has become a draconian enterprise working in concert with a streamlined justice system dubbed Mercy, which algorithmically filters out the more clear-cut criminal cases so they can be tried by an AI judge, with no jury, acting under the assumption that the defendant is “guilty until proven innocent.” The accused has 90 minutes – tick-tock, tick-tock – and the entire internet at their disposal to state their case for innocence. If the argument doesn’t nudge the guilt-probability scale below the threshold, kerzap, the criminal is instantly executed. This is rather, you know, high concept. CAUTION: HAPPY FUN HIGH CONCEPT MAY SUDDENLY ACCELERATE TO DANGEROUS SPEEDS. DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN HIGH CONCEPT.
Chris Raven (Pratt) wakes up in the chair, confused and hung over, the honorable AI Judge Maddox (Ferguson) presiding, a wide-eyed, vaguely upbeat face on a big screen in front of him. Is this fair? Is this justice? Is this the state of a truly civilized society? More importantly, is this the best use of Becky Ferg’s time? Is it OK if I call you Becky Fergs? It’s stated that Mercy “does not make mistakes,” but we’ll see about that, right? Chris is a police detective cop who previously touted the efficacy of Mercy, so the elephant in this room is named Irony. He – Chris, not the elephant – is accused of stabbing his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) to death in their kitchen, and the circumstantial evidence looks bad. He’s an alcoholic who’s back on the sauce; he’s angry; he’s prone to outbursts; their marriage is disintegrating; their teen daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers) doesn’t seem to wholly trust him. Everything points to Chris being gill-T with a capital T.
So he has his work cut out for him. The timer ticks down on the screen pretty much in real time, and another on-screen ticker says Chris is 97.5 percent guilty. No pressure! Our guy insists he’s innocent, of course, and gets to work accessing all the data Big Brother can possibly provide to prove it: Police bodycams, security cams, his wife’s phone data, his daughter’s Instagram account, his daughter’s secret Instagram account, other people’s bank records which apparently aren’t particularly secure, etc. He makes a bunch of hands-free phone calls, getting help from his police cop detective partner Jaq (Kali Reis) as she zooms all over Los Angeles on a “quadcopter,” consulting his AA sponsor buddy (Chris Sullivan), whoever can provide a snippet of info.
So what plays out in front of us? A meta-screen drama in which our screen shows all the screens Chris frantically cycles through: Crappy cell phone footage and news reports and social media posts and facetime calls and other miscellaneous overstimulating digital content. And the only difference between that and what you do with your own phone every day is, Becky Fergs doesn’t stare at you with a benign expression the entire time. At one point, she stumbles over a joke about HMOs, possibly to make us feel better about the AI hell of this society, because hey, if Mercy can learn to appreciate comedy, anybody can!
Photo: Justin Lubin / © Amazon MGM Studios / Courtesy Everett CollectionWhat Movies Will It Remind You Of? Minority Report is an obvious inspiration. And between Mercy and War of the Worlds Twenty-Twenty-Five, it seems increasingly clear that Amazon would love it if everyone lived their lives entirely in front of screens.
Performance Worth Watching: The answer is no. No, this is not worth Becky Fergs’ time.
Sex And Skin: Chris’ failure to consult Pornhub for clues to his innocence is an obvious oversight, since I think it accounts for what, 98 percent of all internet usage?
Photo: Justin Lubin / © Amazon MGM Studios / Courtesy Everett CollectionOur Take: Once Mercy is done filling your screen with Chris’ frantic screenhopping – so much scrolling and swiping accompanied by big WHOOSH noises – deep into the third act, it devolves into essentially an extra-ludicrous version of the OJ Simpson Bronco footage. Finally, a break from all the screen time within the screen time! And that’s when the film’s watery gruel of ideas dries up, opening the door for Bekmambetov to deliver the typical logic-deprived action-movie conclusion consisting of destructive car chases, child endangerment and fistfights. And lo, the high-tech action-thriller becomes just another violent, braindead junkheap.
The director’s visual approach to the material reflects our modern-day eye-crossing experience of constant information-bombardment, which is to say it’s no fun whatsoever. It’s about as cinematic as an especially hyperactive YouTube supercut of amateur teenage pranks and unboxing videos. Within each of those little screens Chris navigates is ostensibly exciting, suspense-building stuff: cops following leads, moronic teenagers letting themselves be kidnapped way too easily, stuff like that. But then the film quickly returns to beads of forehead sweat on Chris Pratt, whose emotional range is narrow, and who spends the vast majority of the movie physically restrained, his wrists strapped to a chair. Meanwhile, Ferguson looks rather silly with her eyes wide, reading copy like the robot that answers the phone whenever you make a last-resort desperation customer-service call to AT&T or the electric company. And we’re left wondering if Mercy’s overarching goal is to squander as much talent as possible, both in front of and behind the camera.
Far more depressing is the film’s gross disinterest in any of its ideas, which fling willy-nilly from this undercooked screenplay (by Marco van Belle) like specks of spittle. The people in this reality are weirdly content to be living in a time of micro-surveillance, the likes of which will get you acquitted from murder – an equivalent to the old shortsighted “watch me all you want, because I never do anything wrong” argument. How does Chris feel about Mercy now that he’s in the hot seat? Does he recognize the irony of the situation? Might he be inspired to implement change if he survives this ordeal? Who knows. The character’s in hyper-tense survival mode for the entire movie, a fate that squashes him flat.
Mercy eventually lands at a hey-maybe-AI-ain’t-so-bad-after-all conclusion, an idealist portrayal of benevolent tech that’s dumb and naive and probably will land with audiences like a sack of wet farts. But despite being bankrolled by Amazon, I don’t think the film is necessarily malevolent in its intent – it simply takes the shortest of shortcuts to a “satisfying” Hollywood-hogwash ending, because it lacks the brainpower to consider for even a moment what it’s doing or saying.
Our Call: Poor Becky Fergs. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
English (US)