When soulless automatons are empowered to judge, neither mercy nor justice is present.
This review contains spoilers for Mercy (2026).
In today’s technological environment, ChatGPT has been available for nearly 4 years. The AI bubble has largely inflated the prices of software such as RAM, SSD, and hard disks to an insane degree. Our current AI infestation has also induced other knock-on economic impacts doing real-world harm to people and the planet. Introducing Mercy in this context feels nearly as heavy-handed as the film’s broader treatment of AI and surveillance.
In Mercy, Detective Raven (Chris Pratt) faces execution for the murder of his wife and has just 90 minutes to prove he is innocent of a crime that is seemingly stacked against him. To prove his innocence, Detective Raven is granted total access to the public cloud, social media activity, public records, and data from participating companies, tasked with uncovering evidence that supports his non-guilty plea.
This setup inverts the supposed ideals of the American judicial system: rather than “innocent until proven guilty”, it focuses instead on “guilty until proven innocent”. The film unintentionally echoes a troubling reality, with the presumption of innocence not being applied evenly in modern society. In practice, the presumption of guilt often falls hard on marginalised communities such as people of colour and LGBTQ+ individuals, with many recent cases providing proof of this.
In Mercy, Detective Raven is given 90 minutes to prove his innocence, which is much longer than many victims of police brutality in the United States are afforded, whether they are guilty of a crime or not. Ultimately, the stakes are the same as the real world: fail to perform what the system expects, and the consequences can be fatal.
Detective Raven ultimately proves his innocence, however, the way in which he does so is a further indictment of the real-world’s police brutality.
Detective Raven is only able to prove his innocence because the chatbot breaks its own rules to give him a prompt to keep trying once the case reaches the highest “statistical certainty” of his guilt possible – 98%, and because he is a cop who participates in and helped build the chatbot-enabled miscarriage of justice now responsible for determining if he remains alive.
A better written story could’ve done something with that- this idea that the only reason the system worked in the case shown in the movie is because the system broke its own rules to protect its agent, and the agent who was accused knew the system well enough to comply with what it truly wanted.
The film ultimately functions as both copaganda and a glossy whitewash of some of the murkier implications of AI automation and decision-making. The closing lines of the movie are, “Human or AI, we all make mistakes, and we all learn”, delivered by Pratt’s Detective Raven. In response, Judge Maddox (Rebecca Fergusson) admits “Yes we do”, ensuring that the AI-enabled system holds the final say over life and death. This is necropolitics in action: a reminder of the system where some lives are systematically marked for survival, and others for erasure.
In Mercy, the accused are visibly pushed towards death, strapped into the executioner’s chair as they watch as the clock ticks down. In reality, the forces of necropolitics are not quite as dramatized and seemingly obfuscated. The themes and plot of this film could have been reworked into a sharp critique of 21st-century society, in which the political elites and billionaires dictate the spread of slop-as-a-service throughout society. Instead, they did heavy lifting to defend the real-world excess of chatbots hiding behind a masquerade of “intelligence”.
The film could’ve been reworked to be critical of slop-as-a-service (so-called “artificial intelligence”) being pushed on society, but falls short of this.
The movie is, in many ways, justifying “AI” as useful and necessary even when it makes mistakes, but those mistakes are responsible textually for murdering Detective Raven and an entire city, thanks to the film’s B-plot about a planned terror attack. As satire, it tries but doesn’t quite hold up, and Chris Pratt talking at a screen for 90 or 99 minutes isn’t quite thriller or action flick territory.