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For a film written by a human — Marco van Belle — Mercy shows all the indicators of being written by AI. In fact, at the very end, there’s even a climactic dialogue that sounds less like a dialogue and more like the disclaimers ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini might use about AI making mistakes.

“We just did what we were programmed to do. Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” declare the two main characters.

How quaint and fitting.

Mercy is what we call a ‘screen-life’ film — a near-real-time story told through screens: tablets, mobile phones, front-door cameras, and surveillance feeds that dig through personal folders, picture galleries, and social media posts. As most such films are thrillers, the premise works to a certain extent before it becomes ludicrous. Mercy, being an uninspired rip-off of Minority Report, is no exception.

However, this is not the first time director-producer Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) has taken inspiration from a Steven Spielberg movie. Last year, he produced a version of War of the Worlds, reframed within the confines of screen life.

Yes, Bekmambetov has a penchant for the genre. In fact, if you’ve seen any screen-life film — Unfriended, its sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, Searching, Missing, R#J (a modern version of Romeo and Juliet), Profile (an adaptation of Anna Erelle’s non-fiction In The Skin of a Jihadist) or CTRL — the chances are that Bekmambetov has a hand in it, either as a producer or director.

Mercy, though, sits a little above every other title in the list. The main leads are Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson. Pratt plays a detective conveniently named Chris, framed for the murder of his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis), and Ferguson is Judge Maddox, his AI.

Maddox is part of a new system designed to quickly pass judgments on presumed perpetrators of violent crimes. The defendant, strapped to a chair in a wide, lone room, has 90 minutes to prove their innocence before a lethal sonic blast ends their life. At their disposal are feeds of all sorts, but no attorney to help their case.

However, the odds are already against them, since the AI — having reviewed the evidence — has already assigned a percentage that the person must bring down to avoid execution. In Chris’ case, he has a 97.5 per cent chance of a death sentence, which he must bring down to 92 per cent. And as we know, AI does not make mistakes — or does it?

The first 20 minutes of the film are bearable, as the ground rules are set and the evidence is laid out, stacking the odds against Chris. But then things quickly turn mediocre as the plot throws false leads and terrorists into the mix. Long before that, one realises Mercy’s biggest problem: a bad casting decision for one key actor.

While Pratt is fine, holding the reins tight while strapped to a chair, Ferguson — a brilliant actress — gets a badly written part and seems to have been directed to underperform. She ‘acts’ quite deliberately, infusing excess emotions into a character that is supposed to be inhuman and effective. That creative call — and not the action or the B-movie cliché — yanks you out of the movie.

One is left with two options: unlike Pratt’s character, abandon the cinema’s seat, or pray for ‘mercy’ that the film ends quickly. Since the runtime (100 minutes) is nearly as long as Chris’ trial, the pain is not that long.

Released in Pakistan by HKC, Mercy is an Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Releasing International release that is rated PG-13 for the usual action stuff

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, February 8th, 2026