Let’s be honest here: a court system run by artificial intelligence doesn’t seem too far off. It’s easy to imagine AI companies approaching the legal system, pitching the benefits of a bot churning through the drudgery of contested parking tickets and other low-level offenses, all in the name of clearing up a clogged judicial system. Higher-ups would rub their hands in delight at the human cost savings, while legal experts would sound alarms about the potential for sloppy AI mistakes.
Mercy imagines a very near future in which the city of Los Angeles has implemented Mercy Court, an AI-driven justice system designed to clean house of the most dangerous and violent offenders, serving as judge, jury, and executioner. These are cases that seem so cut-and-dried that giving someone 90 minutes of due process before executing them feels, to some, “good enough.”
Chris Pratt plays Chris Raven, a police detective who finds himself strapped into the “guilty until proven innocent” electric chair that he himself helped implement. To his shock, he’s accused of murdering his wife and now has 90 minutes (more or less in real time on screen) to prove his innocence to AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson, who deserves better), using all the video and data evidence that seems to indict him.
Mercy is presented as a “screenlife” movie—a term I just learned, meaning all of the visual storytelling unfolds through a collage of screens (smartphones, police cams, Ring cameras, and so on). Chris Pratt sits in his chair, brow furrowed, likely in a green-screen room, reacting to digital images flying around him à la Minority Report. This setup stretches his skills as a dramatic actor (which isn’t saying much) as most of what he does is react to what he’s watching (“Oh God. Please. Jesus, no…”).
The gamification of the court system is an intriguing twist. Chris is constantly staring at numbers: the timer counting down the minutes he has left to prove his innocence and the ever-present percentage of his presumed guilt staying frustratingly static. He has to lower that presumption of guilt to 92 percent, which the system considers enough to establish reasonable doubt. His dismay at seeing the number stuck in the upper 90s—or ticking down only a fraction after what he believes is solid evidence in his favor—invokes the frustration of doing your taxes on TurboTax and watching the red number of money owed go up when you click to the next screen.
It’s ridiculous to think that anyone sorting through files and footage could prove their innocence in 90 minutes. It’s just as silly to presume that any detective could find the real culprit of a crime in the same amount of time and save Los Angeles from blowing up (oops! spoiler!). It’s perhaps silliest of all when an AI court bothers blowing puffs of air at you to make your shirt move while you’re experiencing the virtual reality of being in a burning building. Would a court really include dramatic air puffs in the budget?
I do have to say, though, that even if Mercy is one of those silly sci-fi flicks released in the doldrums of winter, it does make you realize how much of our lives are tracked, from video footage to cell phone data to credit card records. The film’s “what if” scenario, in which this data is used against you in a false accusation, is unnerving enough to make you want to drop off the grid completely.
