Movie Review: “Mercy”
Alice and I went to “Wuthering Heights” in February. Unfortunately, hordes of people had the same idea. Despite the crush, there were a couple of seats available, but we are Boomer moviegoers and wanted to sit together, so we ended up at a showing of “Mercy,” the sci-fi film featuring Chris Pratt as “Chris.” That’s a quick indication of the film’s imaginative reach. You knew going in that the movie was a maybe.
I regret to say that it was as flat as expected, but it was exactly the kind of sci-fi film I like: sort-of terrible but with a satisfying clarity, a one paragraph proposal for dorm-room discussion. The idea of these projects is to advance a single concept and leave you with the task of making a decision. Would the world be better if it were run by machines, or destroyed by a virus, or ruled by apes? It’s a one-trick pony that produces fifteen minutes of slack conversation about an alternative universe. We saw “Bugonia” on Saturday night, and it was an Emma Stone masterclass wrapped around a sophomoric conceit: the bitchy CEO of a pharmaceutical firm is actually an Empress from the Andromeda galaxy. In the last scene she wears a chunky blanket, crocheted from yarn the diameter of your forearm. I didn’t know they had Michaels stores in other galaxies.
In the case of “Mercy,” the idea was justice-by-machine. Chris Raven lives in a near-future Los Angeles (a few blocks from our son’s house in Silver Lake!), where he works as a detective who has fallen off the wagon. After his wife is killed, he is arrested and presented to a new invention, the Mercy Court, where he must defend himself before Rebecca Ferguson, a flat-affect avatar who prejudges him 99% guilty. He has ninety minutes of full digital access to demonstrate that he is not the perpetrator. The irony is that Chris is a big fan of the court, which he sees as an antidote to the exploding crime rate.
Gnarly complications ensue, with not quite enough action to distract us from the tedium. It doesn’t help that Pratt spends the whole of the movie trapped in a chair, facing Ferguson in a lame two-hander that could have happened on a stage. She talks, he talks, she talks again. It would be better if Pratt were zipping around Los Angeles.
But please don’t let me stop you from seeing the film. It’s good enough, in its own sci-fi way. Not as good as “Dune,” but on par with “RoboCop,” with which it shares an appreciation for fragments of humanity, glinting like broken glass in the sand. Same with “Gattaca,” an underappreciated masterpiece.
But it you come for the movie, stay for the credits. Alice and I always watch them, if for no other reason that our son is a screenwriter and we are hopeless Boomers, obsessives, and completists. In for a dime, in for a dollar. In this case, watch for an explosion of diversity. Everyone listed represents a different ethnicity. Timur Bekmambetov is the film’s director. Konstantin Podprugin plays Alexander Varga. Khalid Mohtaseb is the Director of Photography. Michelle Diamantides styled Chris Pratt’s hair.
Everybody comes from a different country, and I haven’t even scratched the surface. I’m assuming they’re all either foreign nationals, second generation, or they immigrated to this country. Any which way, I was proud to see their names and to feel the power and diversity of American filmmaking. It’s an advertisement for the value of open borders.