fter years of civil unrest, proliferating lawlessness, and overcrowded prisons, Los Angeles attempts to push its criminal underbelly into designated “Red Zones,” where police struggle against the escalating violence. But with the utilization of the Mercy Court, a highly advanced A.I.-controlled judge, jury, and executioner, the L.A.P.D. might have finally found a way to curb rising offenses. When Mercy-championing homicide detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) awakens from a drunken stupor to discover himself in the hot seat of fact-obsessed, emotionless Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), levying charges against him of murdering his own wife, Chris has just ninety minutes to prove his innocence or face the algorithm’s stolid wrath.

“Please pay close attention to this important announcement.” The setup is exceptionally timely, what with the rise of artificial intelligence being used in every industry and application; in the race to integrate A.I. into as much as possible, it’s not much of a stretch that judicial constituents may soon get an injection of computer-based upgrades. But despite the topical nature of widespread socioeconomic discontent and other political predicaments speed-running governments’ desires to replace people with robotic thinkers, there’s something starkly disingenuous to include “heroes in blue” perishing in great numbers as an impetus to A.I. courtrooms; in the arena of 2026’s protesting against governmental corruption, an inert legislature, and oppressive federal troops, law enforcement definitely does not feel like easy protagonists.

“Mercy does not make mistakes.” As an obvious extrapolation of “Minority Report” and “Judge Dredd,” both of which took the idea of advanced technologies and justice systems to catastrophic degrees, this latest, not-so-futuristic vision switches up a few concepts about crime and punishment. It conveniently skips over why the onus suddenly shifts to defendants being presumed guilty until proven innocent, or why selected prisoners must serve as their own defense attorney, or why a proper state of mind is not required for a trial to commence, or why that trial must take place during the same day as the arrest. But it’s fitting that Chris is a major proponent of the Mercy Court; in cinematic fashion, it’s not farfetched that he would find himself suffering the consequences of the very program he helped to enact. Of course, this rapid-karma concept nods to the real culprits, if audiences can guess at a few bits of information; it’s all designed to be the antithesis of something like the “Knives Out” pictures, which are largely inscrutable.

The elements it gets right include mass surveillance and its exhaustive overreach, alongside invasions of privacy, extensive video archives from the internet, and dependence on cloud storage (the Municipal Cloud) – with which virtually every citizen is forced to participate. These are obvious places that civilizations will explore, since they’ve already dabbled in them up to this point. And with its near real-time pacing, “Mercy” is a modern, cutting-edge version of an epistolary tale, making the most of immersive photographic and video components to piece together a crime scene and its specifics, placing moviegoers in the very room with the accused.

“I was not designed to feel.” The elements it gets wrong, however, are glaring. For what is supposed to be an impartial arbiter bound by facts, Maddox is awfully expressive. She’s snippy and critical (she scrunches up her face at Chris and even shrugs) before becoming compassionate and helpful – and finally fallible and rule-breaking, negotiating the terms of her programming with someone who has no authority to issue commands. It’s almost worse to be judged with an attitude when it comes from a non-human.

Plus, it’s altogether insincere when a suspect previously unknown to the court is discovered, which does not trigger a change in Chris’ probability of guilt (represented by an onscreen meter); one would think that at the very moment that the court is made aware of the existence of someone else who could have committed the crime, he’d be set free, or a delay would be triggered so that fresh evidence and interrogations could be scrutinized and scheduled. Yet none of these happen; the A.I. judge brushes them off, but only after conducting new investigations that come to definitive conclusions, which eat up Chris’ 90 minutes of sleuthing. The visual percentage is stated to calculate reasonable doubt, yet so many of the facts presented by the court are themselves open to interpretation, backed up by mere circumstantial evidence – such as Chris’ DNA being all over the crime scene, which is his own house, in which he lives. The court also shows oodles of unnecessary footage to establish the lead’s character qualities (or lack thereof; he’s not really a standup guy), solely for the benefit of viewers, which would all be worthless (or even damaging) as he mounts his defense.

“Can you clean it up?” Chris asks of a blurry frame of film, which, expectedly, receives the classic movie moment of enhanced pixels, suddenly revealing some shocking revelation. In the end, the movie offers a fun idea with a thrilling premise, but the execution is ludicrous. It may prove once again that any foolproof system orchestrated by humans is entirely corruptible by humans, but the climax here is laughably absurd.

– The Massie Twins