“This program is the reason you can sleep at night” is just one of many self-asserting proclamations contained within a public-relations campaign by the city of Los Angeles to convince its citizens of the value of the “Mercy Capital Court,” a “judge, jury, and executioner” operated entirely by artificial intelligence. So far, “Mercy” has executed eighteen people—“the future of law enforcement is ‘Mercy!’” The group that advocated most heedlessly for “Mercy” was the Los Angeles Police Department. One afternoon, one of their number wakes up to find himself strapped by his right wrist into a wheelchair-like contraption in a pitch-dark room with a large screen on the wall in front of him. The screen flickers on and a judge appears. “This can’t be real,” an incredulous Chris Raven, played by Chris Pratt, says. “I assure you this is very real,” Artificial-Intelligence-Judge Maddox, played by Rebecca Ferguson, replies sombrely. “Please exhale Mr Raven,” she says, proprietorially, checking his blood-alcohol level to ensure he isn’t too drunk to be executed. On August 14, 2029, according to police body-cam evidence, “you and you alone were in the house with Nicole [Chris’s wife] at the time she was stabbed.” The way it works is that a probability of guilt is assigned; if that probability is above ninety-two percent after ninety minutes the prisoner is executed automatically by “fatal sonic pulse.” The defendant does not get to consult a lawyer and has nobody to advocate on his behalf.
Such is the dazzling opening to “Mercy” (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse. We cut to a breathy newsreader to fill in the gaps. “One day he’s sending people to the “Mercy Court”; the next day he’s there.” The judge and Chris are often at odds; “You’re lying,” Chris says. “I do not lie. Nor do the facts,” Judge Maddox replies. But of course the plot revolves entirely around those “facts” being not so factual—correlation rather than cause.
A gruesome counter on the top-right of the screen in front of Chris ticks down the seconds until his inevitable execution and is a cinematic device to introduce urgency. Information is presented to support the guilty verdict by a whirlwind of data which envelops, bleeds into, and dances across the screen, overwhelming the cinematic audience’s ability to take it all in. It is a movie very much for the era of sophisticated gaming. The idea of information pouring onto a screen like a waterfall to collect evidence is similar to another outstanding film, “Searching,” from 2018, starring John Cho. But on the whole, “Mercy” feels most like “Enemy of the State” (1998), an iconic Will Smith/Gene Hackman movie, one of the biggest films of the nineteen-nineties, here updated for the era of “socials” and the “municipal cloud”—which involuntarily stores every possible piece of data on citizens of the city—and the era of surveillance. (There is a scene in a hotel elevator which reminded me of one of the strongest set-pieces of “Enemy.”) With these two excellent forebears, “Mercy” could not really fail to deliver.
Both Mr Pratt and Ms Ferguson have to do most of the acting with their faces. Ms Ferguson’s performance in particular will really linger. Poised, smug, confident, she purses her lips, thrusts out her chin while pinching in her cheeks, all the while moving her head with tiny, precise, mechanical, jerking movements, like an android. “You lost your temper fifty-seven times in six months,” she tells Chris. (Is there a hint of great pleasure in her expression?) Anger, she tells him, is a “neurobiological phenomenon.” And all this while he has minutes to live.
As a thriller, “Mercy” is hard to beat. As an experience of submersion, “Mercy” is impossible to beat. When Judge Maddox, “generating scene reconstruction from trajectory data,” establishes in the court a virtual-reality image of a chase as witnessed by a drone, television-news helicopters circling, Chris is his wheelchair in the middle of it all, the newsreader is surely right when he says, “Take a look at this. Wow.” This immersion is mirrored in the almost infinite “scene cams,” which tend to show just the faces, shoulders and hair of the minor characters, intensifying immediacy and heightening emotional tension. The rapidly accumulating evidence—such as recreating an identify from a footprint, and generating an “interactive virtual copy of Nicole’s cellphone,” and gathering data from a flying police vehicle which is a cross of a motorbike with a drone—is breathtaking in its creativity and awe-inspiring in its execution.
For one reason or another Hollywood seems to revel in the reckless sabotage of its own five-star movies—like “Mercy”—with puerile, clumsy, gun-soaked shootouts. I won’t reveal the various twists and turns at the end, of which there are many, some of which are very, very clever. It’s a shame that imagination runs out and guns run in. Still, overall, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is to be praised for opposing the head-first dive into so-called artificial intelligence and assuming that it can, say, run the criminal justice system more fairly than we can. In the summary to last February’s equally substantial offering, “Companion,” I wrote that much of the hype about artificial intelligence stands upon a solid foundation of greed. Investors make money. Technology must be a winner. (There was a second film in 2025 which dealt with the militaristic use of the technology, “M3GAN 2.0,” which I reviewed in July.)
According to “Mercy,” many people, like Nicole’s dad, believe that “you don’t get the ‘Mercy Trial’ unless you’re guilty.” Judge Maddox puts it differently. “One constant in this court,” she says. “Everyone lies.” But later, she seems to contradict her statement that “I was not designed to feel” by an urge to direct Chris. “You are getting distracted by emotion,” she says, smugly. “I must remind you that the clock is ticking.”
Adam Poole
30th January 2026
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