If you believe the apocryphal story, the first victim of an ancient torture device that roasted its captives alive could have been the inventor itself.
Elaborately and pointlessly cruel in every respect, the “brazen bull,” thought to have been designed in ancient Greece, was a large, hollow bronze bull statue with a lockable door. The victim would be trapped inside, after which the device would be positioned over a fire. The unfortunate condemned would then start to feel the walls slowly, inexorably heating up.
As the device’s temperature increased, the accompanying screams from its prisoner would be carried through a series of pipes, exiting from the bull’s mouth and nostrils, which by then would be pouring steam. The animalistic wail echoing out was said to mimic the cry of a cow.
Similarly, Chris Pratt’s Mercy, out today, may leave you moaning in agony. But the occasionally tortuous, more often bland experience of watching “Minority Report for babies” is not what really connects this pseudo sci-fi to an ancient tale about execution. Instead, it’s an element of irony embedded in the early minutes of the film’s script — and then the meta-irony of it completely abandoning, or simply misunderstanding, the risk it’s talking about in the first place.
You see, Mercy is a topical, cautionary tale about our own immediate future. In its opening moments, it is August 2029 when Detective Chris Raven (Pratt) wakes up to the dulcet, expositional tones of a commercial rehashing the benefits of the “Mercy Court” — the same court he helped both establish and feed with a steady stream of criminals whom he viewed as little more than human filth.
WATCH | Mercy trailer:
That court is the ultra-efficient evolution of jurisprudence, a legal tribunal that deals solely with capital punishment, presided over by an impartial AI judge. It was instituted to help manage an unmanageable wave of crime, one that led to whole swaths of major cities clogged by tent-filled, criminal-run “red zones.”
As we’re informed, it is only by the brave enforcement of the law by quadcopter-riding, drone-surveilling cops that things have been kept in check. Oh, and the deterrent fear instilled by the Mercy Court, whose merciless efficiency is only the first example of painfully on-the-nose cultural commentary.
Unfortunately for Chris, he’s not just receiving an on-the-job refresher. Instead, he’s getting a trial of his own; just a day earlier, his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) was stabbed to death in their home. And given the fact that his daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers), police partner Jaq (Kali Reis) and AA sponsor Rob (Chris Sullivan) have all provided evidence pointing squarely at Chris, he’s found himself as the lead suspect.
So, like 18 other defendants before him, he’s been locked in a chair designed to deliver a lethal sonic pulse in exactly 90 minutes. The only way out is to prove to the AI-powered Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) that there’s a less than 92 per cent chance he’s guilty. Given the fact that the last 18 accused were all put to death, the odds aren’t exactly in his favour.
A ‘making dinner’ kind of movie
As a set-up, it’s not exactly horrible. Perhaps a little contrived, it still functions as a potential blunt narrative weapon for satire, the kind that sci-fi often employs to make sometimes-incisive, sometimes-spurious commentary on where our society is headed. Ignore the clunky and rushed ending with virtually no logical connection to what came before, and Mercy is almost bearable as a make-dinner-to-this type of movie.
In fact, just dumb down the Black Mirror episode “Crocodile” from 2017 — in which a mind-reading device makes determining criminal guilt as simple as pressing a button — and you’re halfway there.
So what’s the problem? It’s all under the hood. For example, consider “Crocodile” once again. As near-future sci-fi, it is a clear allegory, a pointed criticism of the surveillance state and our misguided tendency to trade our liberty for safety.
To make that point, Black Mirror sets up the tension between what the average person might assume about crime and the complexities of putting those ideas into practice. The belief that judgment-by-technology is fine — since only criminals should have cause to worry — clashes with the reality of focusing cold, inhuman pressure on desperate people. Usually, it leads to more tragedy and pain for everyone.
Mercy walks gingerly toward a similar contrivance. Setting Chris up as a once-prejudiced cop now trapped by the same uncaring system he helped maintain, it feels obvious where the film wants to go. It’s, on the surface, an almost beat-for-beat remake of the brazen bull story: a tale of an apathetic inventor who, by poetic justice, finds himself at the receiving end of the evil he’d heartlessly intended to dole out to others.
In fact, part of why so many scholars think that story is fake is that it rings too true. The rampant villainy and cosmic irony it exposes in both the ruling class and those who go from supporting it to being consumed by it is just too perfect. Which makes it all the more surprising — and more than a little offensive — when Mercy unceremoniously abandons this thread.
Selfish self-interest
Instead of casting the desire for retributive justice as something at least worth pondering over, Chris simply becomes a more dogged criminal hunter over the course of his trial. In a desperate bid to save himself and what remains of his own family, he flings the flimsily-set-up self-reflection aspect out the window.
It’s an oversight that could normally be excused for what is essentially a gussied-up streaming movie. But given that director Timur Bekmambetov and writer Marco van Belle pointedly choose to set it up as a theme, purposely ditching it seems just as pointed.
It even seems apt that the title is a plainer synonym for the far superior Clemency. Where that 2019 movie mined the torturous self-analysis of a prison warden who grows increasingly disillusioned with capital punishment, Mercy clumsily tosses the debate around, before disinterestedly leaving it in the mud.
Perhaps even worse, though, is what replaces that concept. As Mercy reaches its midpoint — and its egregiously stupid end — it morphs into a bizarre PR campaign for AI. Instead of Chris finding his humanity, more and more we focus on the judge with the heart of gold: a ChatGPT analogue described as unflinchingly focused on the facts and, inexplicably, considerate of human emotion.
“Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” Chris knowingly intones toward the end. “And we learn.”
Whereas before Mercy was simply uninteresting, here its idiocy becomes offensive. Prior to the actual introduction of generative AI in real life, directors could rely on this kind of specious fable to draw tears in I, Robot or AI: Artificial Intelligence.
But now, it reads as nothing short of moronic; AI is neither dependably accurate, nor — obviously — a compassionate, self-aware, human rights advocate. A movie that opts to hold hands with it, and dream of the halcyon future when it decides on whether actual humans live or die, is more than dumb. Like the inventor of the brazen bull, it’s more angling to trap us all in a hell of its own making.
Though, to be fair, Mercy is dumb, too.
