Mercy

This should be the most relevant film of the year. Director Timur Bekmambetov’s latest centres on AI surveillance, severe social inequality, heavy-handed policing and governments’ tendency to slap a ‘tough on crime’ sticker on the issue at hand and call it a day. Instead, this is Minority Report minor; the same idea, but dumber.

The film’s first mistake is to take Chris Pratt, a guy you know either as a gifted physical comedian or as an action hero, and strap him into a chair for the duration. He’s LAPD homicide detective Chris Raven: a classic action-hero name, and probably not a nod to producer Charles Roven. He awakens, confused, on trial before an AI judge, Rebecca Ferguson’s Maddox. With no presumption of innocence to protect him, he must establish reasonable doubt that he murdered his wife in 90 minutes. Cue a real-time phone-based thriller plot to prove his innocence.

Shies away from the tough questions while taking itself too seriously to offer brainless fun.

The pacing of the revelations is rather well handled; thrills, however, are thin on the ground. A few small moments of action punctuate the chat between the desperate Raven and Maddox, who’s usually stern but occasionally sympathetic, but until the otherwise overbaked final 20 minutes, there isn’t much of it. What’s worse, the world-building is desultory and inconsistent. The film conflates inequality and crime, homelessness and violence, and never wonders about its conclusions; it talks about scary “red zones” of lawlessness, but places a swish hotel apparently in the middle of one. Even by the end, no-one seems to doubt that mass surveillance is reasonable and useful.

It’s a frustrating mess, in other words. There are fun ideas here and solid performances – though God help Annabelle Wallis, stuck in a thankless wife role for what feels like the 100th time – but it shies away from the tough questions while taking itself too seriously to simply offer brainless fun. It should be far easier than this to make the case that justice matters, and cannot be offloaded to the cloud.