Should Have Been Killed in Its Sleep

We just covered Project Hail Mary, which has become one of Amazon MGM’s highest opening films of all time. But while we appreciate that film and love that it’s doing well, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that right before Amazon had a hit with their sci-fi film they had just had a massive bomb with another sci-fi movie. Although, really, calling Mercy a sci-fi film is a bit of a misnomer. It’s really your dad’s version of a police procedural dressed up with the barest minimum of Twilight Zone-style conceptual “what if”.

Oh, and it also sucks. Mercy was dropped into theaters in January of 2026, and you can tell that Amazon had absolutely no faith in the movie. And why should they? It’s directed by Timur Bekmambetov and is, functionally, a found footage sci-fi film with our “hero” (played by Chris Pratt) browsing through social media feeds and online posts while he sits in a chair for the duration of the movie. That should sound familiar as Timur Bekmambetov was also the guy that came up with another sci-fi, found footage film about a dude sitting in a chair, looking at social media feeds. That movie was 2025’s War of the World, the most mocked film of that year (and functionally the worst movie released in 2025), and Mercy effectively takes that same concept and blows even more money on it.

Why did Amazon even green light Mercy when they’d already seen how bad the concept could be with War of the Worlds? That film sat in a can for five years before Amazon finally trotted it out just to burn it off. You would think, with that kind of knowing treatment, they wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere near another one of these abominations. And yet they did, so we could all sit on our couches (because no one saw this in theaters) watched Pratt sit in his chair while the whole plot of the film played out in front of it. It’s tiresome and tedious, and that’s before we even get into the awful story that strings the film along.

Mercy focuses on Det. Chris Raven (Pratt, playing a character whose name feels like a first draft that really should have been changed in the script editing process), a decorated officer who has been one of the driving forces behind the Mercy Capital Court program. That program takes known criminals, the worst of the worst, and puts them on trial for their most recent crime. They’re hooked up to a chair with an AI judge presiding, and they are given ninety minutes to make their case with all the resources and utilities of the court at their disposal. If they prove their innocence (at least to a reasonable doubt) then the defendant can go free. But if they fail to make their case in ninety minutes, the chair kills them. And all of this to help fight crime in L.A. which has become an absolute hellhole warzone and only the hard right hand of the law can set things straight.

Unfortunately for Chris, he’s just been charged with the murder of his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis). He has no alibi, and all the evidence at the scene points to him. Thankfully his partner, Jaq Diallo (Kali Reis), is still willing to help him, aiding her partner as they work the case in ninety minutes or less. But with the AI judge, Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) overseeing the case, Chris isn’t sure if he’ll get a fair trial or not. It’s a race against the clock to prove his innocence… if he really is innocent at all.

There are a huge number of flaws with Mercy that the film isn’t able to get away from, but the biggest issue is that, functionally, this is a film about watching a dude in a chair while he actually watches the real movie. That is exactly as thrilling as it sounds. Chris Pratt sits in a chair, in front of a green screen, for one hundred minutes, and we just have to bear with it while the film tries desperately to make us care about anything going on in the movie. Conceptually the film fails to do this because it’s really hard to get invested in a film about a dude scrolling social media feeds. But it’s even harder to do it when it’s Chris Pratt at the center of it all.

There was a time, on Parks and Recreation, where Pratt was the loveable goofball everyone enjoyed. Years of time in the spotlight though, with all his terrible political takes and shitty things he’s said, have tarnished his reputation. His performance here, as Chris Raven (I swear, we need the sound of ravens cawing every time his name is said), doesn’t help matters. He’s rude, conceited, and acts like an asshole for the entire first act of the film. And that doesn’t feel like a performance; it just feels like Pratt being Pratt. To enjoy this film you have to care about Chris Raven, and that’s hard to do when Chris Pratt is playing him. By the end of the first act I was ready for the judge to say, “you know what. You’re guilty. Let’s just get this over with,” and set the chair to medium high execution.

If you can somehow get past that, though, what we have is about ninety minutes, told more or less real time, of Raven working a case to prove his own innocence. It’s not a complicated case since he has to be able to solve it in such a short window. That means all the evidence is right there in front of him, easy to pick out and sort. It’s so easy, in fact, that it makes you wonder why Raven was immediately thrown into Mercy Court when everyone should have been able to figure it out within a few hours. The movie really wants us to think that in less than a day a guy goes from being arrested to, functionally, getting put on the electric chair without any time for other suspects to even be looked at. And somehow this is supposed to be a good thing?

What makes this even worse is that the film does all this to spin a tale of right wing copaganda. L.A., a blue city, is a hellhole because of wealth inequality and a lack of social services. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say that the poors and the homeless are the root cause of all of L.A.’s problems and they had to be dealt with sternly. Can’t have the underserved causing problems like being seen or needing assistance. Crimes went up (because no one was taking care of the desperate) and so to fight crime the Mercy Capital Court program was instituted. A whopping thirteen cases were tried, and that somehow lowered the crime rate by sixty-eight percent. That… doesn’t make sense. It’s a right wing fever dream about killing the unhoused as a warning to everyone else, and it’s pretty disgusting.

Not that I think everything about this film is terrible. I think a film set from the perspective of the accused, where he has to solve his own trail in real time is interesting. The idea that you’re hooked up to a chair and will die if you don’t prove your innocence does have a Twilight Zone kind of hook to it. It would pay off better if Raven was then executed only for it to then come out that he was innocent, showing the flaws in the system and how a rush to trial only leads to more injustice… but this film isn’t that smart. It has one little kernel of a good idea and squanders it on a terrible story, with bad production values, all to give us a film that no one wants to watch.

What’s most galling about this is that Amazon MGM spent $60 Mil on this film. That much money to watch a dude sit in a chair in front of a green screen. It really cost that much money to make Mercy? That’s astoundingly stupid. Found footage movies that have relied on social media feeds to tell their stories have been done cheaply and effectively before. Unfriended cost $1 Mil to make. Searching was made for $800k. Mercy saw those budgets and considered them small potatoes, blowing way past them sixty-fold. And for what? A film that didn’t even out perform those other, better movies. What was Amazon MGM thinking?

However you cut it, Mercy is a terrible movie. Poorly conceived, poorly acted, and poorly produced. I don’t know if having a different lead actor at the center of it all would have helped. At the very least someone cheaper than Pratt (who is pretty well overpaid at this point) would have helped bring the budget down. This film might have been able to make a profit if it had been made for much, much less, but that still wouldn’t have fixed all the flaws inherent to this movie. It’s hard-right copaganda dressed up as speculative fiction, lacking even half a brain cell to understand what a movie like this should be. In short, it sucks.