{"id":250413,"date":"2026-01-21T19:33:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T19:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/250413\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T19:33:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T19:33:10","slug":"chris-pratt-finds-a-new-vibe-in-future-shock-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/250413\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Pratt Finds a New Vibe in Future-Shock Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cMercy<\/a>\u201d is built around two hooks that feel destined to inspire a lack of enthusiasm among critics. The first is that it stars Chris Pratt<\/a>, who has not exactly found favor in the twelve years since he held down the center of \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy.\u201d In that movie, he seemed a natural-born star; his likability was part of the film\u2019s chattery spontaneous pre-Marvel-overkill flow. Yet Pratt started to get swallowed up by the top-heavy franchise movies he was in \u2014\u00a0and it didn\u2019t help that reviewers, weirdly, seemed to hold him almost responsible for his character\u2019s stalker ethics in \u201cPassengers\u201d (2016). Over those last dozen years, he became a B-list presence.<\/p>\n

\n\tPratt factor aside, the premise of \u201cMercy\u201d makes it sound like one of those thin, doctrinaire anti-technology, anti-police-state thrillers that Arnold Schwarzenegger might have starred in 40 years ago (and did, in fact, when he made \u201cThe Running Man\u201d). But the movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the not-so-far-away future, Pratt\u2019s Chris Raven is an LAPD officer \u2014 decent at heart, dirty around the edges \u2014 who wakes up after a bender to learn that he has been arrested and strapped into a digitally wired interrogation chair. Accused of killing his wife in cold blood, he is now the latest defendant in the Mercy program, a tolerance-is-for-suckers anti-crime experiment that sounds like pure government-meets-big-tech future-shock fascism. You\u2019re placed on trial in front of an AI-generated enforcer named Judge Maddox (played, in a witty piece of casting, by the elegant Rebecca Ferguson<\/a>), who is in fact going to be\u00a0your judge, jury, and executioner. According to the law, you\u2019re presumed guilty until proven innocent. Raven has just 90 minutes to defend himself and call up any evidence he wants. If the probability of his innocence dips below 94 percent (i.e., reasonable doubt), he\u2019ll go free. If it doesn\u2019t, he\u2019ll be executed when the clock runs out.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis real-time thriller, in the tradition of \u201cD.O.A.\u201d and \u201cTimecode,\u201d is designed to make us go, \u201cGod, what a nightmare system.\u201d And since the prospect of death-by-virtual-judge-by-evidentiary-algorithm sounds like the sort of demagogic idea that might fit all too well into the place America could now be on its way to becoming, we see the timely parallels. Yet as moviegoers, we\u2019re still bracing ourselves for a one-note dystopian thriller-satire.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first surprise of \u201cMercy\u201d is that the virtual courtroom Raven finds himself in, with images scrolling around like something out of a pulp version of \u201cMinority Report,\u201d isn\u2019t stacked against him in the way we expect. I mean, it sort of is, but since Raven is free to dial up anything he wants (documents, witnesses, surveillance footage) at the touch of a keypad, he\u2019s got a universe of investigative power at his fingertips. All the evidence will be judged fairly. And since he can zip from one surveillance-camera clip to the next, and use that ability to essentially go back in time, the sheer speed and density with which the clues pile up make \u201cMercy\u201d an avidly watchable mystery, even if it\u2019s got a rather standard conspiracy plot at its core.<\/p>\n

\n\tPratt\u2019s Raven is like a Bruce Willis character from the \u201990s, and if he simply headed out into the streets of L.A. to clear his name, the film might feel like wall-to-wall clich\u00e9. Instead, scenes of detective action flash by in a pinpoint moment rather than overstaying their welcome. \u201cMercy,\u201d directed by Timur Bekmambetov (\u201cWanted\u201d) with a crisp short-attention-span gusto (the film has three editors, and you can see why), is like \u201cMinority Report\u201d meets \u201cMemento\u201d meets \u201cCops\u201d meets a crime-detective video game. It threads Raven\u2019s investigation through a multimedia mixmaster. And Pratt is compelling in it. He got swallowed up in franchise-ville because he let himself become an actor of bland good vibes, but here he\u2019s sharp and nasty and a bit \u201cdark,\u201d which looks better on him.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt first, of course, the evidence that points to Raven being guilty looks airtight. He and his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis), were in the midst of divorcing, and we see him show up at the house the morning of the murder, angry and reckless, demanding to be let in; minutes later, Nicole is lying in a pool of blood, having been stabbed with a kitchen knife. After the crime, Raven headed to a bar and drank so much that he can\u2019t even remember what happened. (That he spent the last year falling off the wagon, taking nips of whiskey in the garage, only makes him look more scurrilous.) Solving the crime will require quick detours into the lives of his loyal partner who was killed (Kenneth Choi); his new partner (Kali Reis), who seems the soul of trustiness; his blustery AA sponsor (Chris Sullivan); and his teen-brat daughter (Kylie Rogers).<\/p>\n

\n\tYet none of them is as fully realized a character as Judge Maddox. She\u2019s a completely programmed presence, but Rebecca Ferguson, speaking in authoritarian tones of dulcet logic, endows her with that barely perceptible twinkle of AI \u201cconsciousness.\u201d As the film presents it, the Mercy program is fascistic. And Raven, as we learn, was responsible for bringing to trial its very first defendant. It was a show trial, designed to prove the superiority of judgment-by-AI. But can an AI judge really judge the evidence? Actually, the movie\u2019s sly joke is that an AI judge might be able to do that more objectively than a jury; but it also needs a little human factor to collaborate with. You expect \u201cMercy\u201d to be anti-AI, but it might be the first film of its era \u2014 it will not be the last \u2014 to look at AI and ask, \u201cCan we all get along?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMercy\u201d is built around two hooks that feel destined to inspire a lack of enthusiasm among critics. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3249,146,85,46,47024,397,45226],"class_list":{"0":"post-250413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-chris-pratt","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-mercy","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-rebecca-ferguson"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}