When Parks and Recreation first hit the air, Chris Pratt’s Andy Dwyer was the soul of the show. He was the lovable, dim-witted goofball who lived in a pit and played in a band called Mouse Rat. There was an inherent, puppy-dog vulnerability to Pratt back then, a human-ness that felt unmanufactured. We rooted for him because he felt like the guy next door who just happened to be hilarious. Fast forward to 2026, and the Pratt-ification of Hollywood has moved into a strange, clinical new phase with Mercy. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, this is a screenlife techno-thriller that feels less like a movie and more like a high-stress Zoom call from hell. While I’ve spent years watching Pratt transition from the charming schlub of Pawnee to the chiseled savior of the galaxy, Mercy is the first time I’ve felt he’s truly struggling to find the human beneath the movie-star gloss. It’s a performance that feels tailored for an algorithm rather than an audience, which is perhaps fitting given the film’s central conceit.
The film is set in a grim, near-future Los Angeles. Pratt plays Detective Christopher Raven, a man who has spent his career championing the Mercy program, an AI-driven judicial system designed to eliminate human bias and legal red tape. The irony, as thick as a deep-dish pizza, is that Raven wakes up strapped to an execution chair, accused of brutally murdering his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis). He is given 90 minutes, the literal runtime of the film, to prove his innocence to Judge Maddox, an AI adjudicator voiced with a chilling, metallic silkiness by Rebecca Ferguson. If he fails to drop his Guilty Meter below a specific threshold, the chair kills him. It’s a classic Bekmambetov setup: high-concept, frenetic, and told entirely through digital interfaces, body cams, and doorbell footage. For a director who once gave us a movie about assassins who curve bullets, this is relatively restrained, but it still feels like a sensory assault.
The parallels to Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report are immediate and impossible to ignore. Both films center on a law enforcement officer who is an evangelist for a "perfect" system until that very system turns its gaze upon him. In Minority Report, John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the face of Pre-Crime, a system that stops murders before they happen. In Mercy, Raven is the face of a system that guarantees a conviction with mathematical certainty. However, where Spielberg used the Pre-Cogs to explore the philosophical tension between free will and determinism, Bekmambetov uses the Mercy AI to explore the data-driven nihilism of the modern world. Anderton’s journey was one of shadows and light, a neo-noir odyssey through a blue-tinted future. Raven’s journey is one of pixels and loading bars, a frantic scroll through a digital graveyard. The stakes feel just as high, but the world feels significantly smaller when viewed through a laptop screen.
Watching Pratt in Mercy made me deeply nostalgic for the Andy Dwyer days. In Parks and Rec, Pratt’s eyes were always full of life, even when Andy was being an idiot. In Mercy, his performance feels calibrated. As Detective Raven, Pratt spends the majority of the film in a state of high-pitch panic. He’s crying, he’s shouting at screens, and he’s frantically swiping through his late wife’s digital history. But there’s a disconnect. Because the film is so reliant on the screenlife gimmick, Pratt is often acting directly into a lens, and it exposes the artifice. The raw, relatable quality that made him a star is buried under layers of serious actor intensity. There’s a scene where he’s reviewing footage of his daughter, Britt (Kylie Rogers), and trying to convey the crushing weight of grief and guilt. Ten years ago, I would have been right there with him. Here, it felt like I was watching a man perform Grief with a capital G. It’s hard to tell if it’s the script, the direction, or simply that Pratt has become so synonymous with Generic Action Lead that it’s hard to buy him as a broken, alcoholic detective on the brink of execution.
Minority Report succeeded because it grounded its high-tech world in tactile, physical reality. You felt the weight of the mag-lev cars and the coldness of the containment tubes. Mercy, by design, lacks that physicality. Everything is filtered through an interface. When Raven tries to reconstruct the crime scene using AR overlays, it feels like we’re watching someone play a very high-stakes version of an investigation game. This distance makes it difficult to engage with Raven as a person. We see him through a web-cam, a dash-cam, and a body-cam, but we rarely feel like we’re seeing the man himself. We are looking at a digital representation of a man, which might be the point Bekmambetov is trying to make, but it makes for an emotionally taxing viewing experience.
The film’s strength lies in its pacing. The real-time aspect actually works. As Raven combs through the Municipal Cloud, pulling up every text message and surveillance angle of the night in question, the mystery does pull you in. We meet his partner, Jaq (played by a steely Kali Reis), and his AA sponsor, Rob (Chris Sullivan), through FaceTime windows and grainy CCTV. Sullivan, in particular, brings a much-needed groundedness to the film. As Rob, a man with his own ties to the Mercy system's dark history, he provides the only moments that feel like they belong in a character-driven thriller rather than a tech demo. His scenes are the only ones that break through the digital clutter and offer a glimpse of the "old" Pratt—a man who actually listens and reacts with genuine human emotion.
The central conflict, human intuition versus algorithmic truth, is timely, especially as we sit here in 2026 dealing with our own AI integration. The film correctly identifies that a perfect system is only as good as the flawed data we feed it. In Minority Report, the "minority report" was the human glitch in the machine—the proof that the future isn't set in stone. In Mercy, the "glitch" is more insidious. It’s the realization that the AI isn't just predicting guilt; it’s manufacturing it based on a pre-determined narrative. But where Spielberg gave us a sprawling, cinematic resolution, Bekmambetov gives us a claustrophobic one. The film doesn't want to change the world; it just wants Raven to survive his 90-minute sentence. This narrow focus makes the film feel less like a grand sci-fi statement and more like a very expensive episode of a procedural drama.
By the time the third act rolls around, complete with a bomb threat and a network glitch that feels like a convenient plot device, the tension begins to deflate. The resolution of the mystery is serviceable, if a bit predictable for anyone who has seen a procedural in the last decade. There is no grand revelation about the nature of justice, only a messy scramble for survival. The ending lacks the philosophical resonance of Anderton finding peace in a remote cabin. Instead, we’re left with a man who has survived the machine but is clearly still haunted by it.
Mercy isn't a disaster, but it’s a cold experience. It’s a film that utilizes voyeuristic cameras and linked screens to tell a story about a man’s soul, yet it forgets to actually show us that soul. I left the film wishing for a bit more of that Andy Dwyer spark, the messy, unpolished, human element that no AI judge could ever quantify. Chris Pratt is still a massive screen presence, but in Mercy, he’s just another piece of data in a very expensive machine. If you’re a fan of the screenlife genre, it’s worth a look for the technical craft alone, but don't expect it to stay with you once the screen goes black. It is a film of its time, a 2026 artifact that perfectly captures our anxiety about the machines we’ve built, but it lacks the timeless, human heartbeat that made the goofball from Pawnee so special in the first place. Comparing it to Minority Report only highlights what’s missing: the sense of wonder and the belief that a single human can still outmaneuver the most sophisticated algorithm. In Mercy, the algorithm always has the last word.
For those looking to add the film to their physical collection, the Mercy Blu-ray is currently available, though it’s worth noting this is a decidedly "bare bones" release. You won’t find any deep-dive featurettes or commentary tracks here, which feels like a missed opportunity given the film's complex "screenlife" production. However, where the disc lacks in supplements, it more than makes up for in technical prowess. The 1080p transfer looks phenomenal, preserving the intentional digital grit and sharp UI overlays without any noticeable compression artifacts. The audio is equally impressive, with a robust DTS-HD Master Audio track that makes every frantic notification ping and distorted FaceTime glitch feel unnervingly local. For a film built on digital immersion, the high-bitrate presentation is the only way to truly experience Bekmambetov’s vision.
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