Review: Sci-fi trial thriller 'Mercy' offers none of it to helplessly bombarded viewers

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

The schlocky dystopian action thriller “Mercy” touts itself as having been “filmed for Imax,” but that’s not such a selling point when almost the entire film is a dim close-up of Chris Pratt strapped to a chair.This real-time AI mystery is a mashup of “Judge Dredd” and “Searching,” in which a Los Angeles detective (Pratt) has to prove himself innocent of murder during a 90-minute trial conducted by an artificially intelligent system called Mercy, presided over by an entity known as Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson).Written by Marco van Belle and directed by Russian action auteur Timur Bekmambetov, “Mercy” is a remarkably — though perhaps not surprisingly — conservative film, one that manages to be both pro-cop and pro-AI.

It uncritically presents a city that has been rapidly transformed into a militarized surveillance state, with a judicial system run by robots serving as judge, jury and executioner.But hey, crime is down, or at least cordoned off in the Hollywood “Red Zone.”Detective Chris Raven (Pratt), one of the first cops to utilize Mercy to try a murder case, finds himself on the wrong side of the law when his wife (Annabelle Wallis) is found stabbed to death at home; he is located blackout drunk at a bar at 11 a.m.

Raven wakes up already inside the Mercy system with 90 minutes to prove his innocence or at least get his probability of guilt under 92% and avoid instant death.He has the entire AI surveillance apparatus at his fingertips, including police bodycam footage, video doorbells and social media accounts connected to the “municipal cloud,” and he gets the option to phone a friend, like his partner, Jaq (Kali Reis), distraught daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers) and sponsor Rob (Chris Sullivan), to try and pull the pieces together.Of course all of this material is to make the film more cinematic, because watching Pratt and Ferguson talk to e...