Science fiction is, bluntly, one of the easiest genres to mess up. A desperation for some sophisticated, original concept; a perceived need for some scathingly real social commentary; and a cast of actors able to bring that futuristic vision into believability. It’s a genre delivering many of our modern disasterpieces, such as 2024’s financial, insufferable catastrophes Atlas and Subservience — also both happening to be about artificial intelligence (AI).
In his post-Guardians days, Chris Pratt has chosen to helm this practice, annually providing us with sci-fi slop that isn’t just about AI, but feels like it was written by one. After his 2025 release The Electric State demarcated a new territory for straight-to-streaming failures, he recently embarked on a quest to one-up himself in the 2026 AI thriller Mercy, directed by Timur Bekmambetov.
While not quite as strong of a financial faceplant as his other recent efforts, Mercy makes up for that in its utterly atrocious, borderline AI propaganda script. Commencing as a decent enough cautionary tale on letting AI lead our lives, we are brought into an unfortunately prescient future where “millions are affected by crime” (yes, that is what they say, said to us by a narrator who never returns beyond the first two minutes) and AI judges are put in place to quickly, ‘fairly’ and efficiently bring justice to the criminal onslaught.
Pratt’s character, a police officer and a strong advocate for this judicial system, is put on trial at a near-100% estimation of guilt for murdering his own wife, and is now at the mercy of AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson).
For how severely this movie lands as ephemeral, culturally tone-deaf nonsense by the end, the opening act isn’t too bad: a competently engaging — if quite vapid and unchallenging, but did anyone expect otherwise? — court battle to prove Pratt’s innocence while also tackling the grief of his lost love. With nearly the entire film taking place through the digital habitat of the courtroom, there’s still a fair bit of intrigue in the air, even if the destinations of the story quickly become predictable or just quite daft.
As someone vehemently against AI’s interception of the arts, my low expectations for Mercy were admittedly tackled a little by the beginning’s seemingly bold narrative prospects. It didn’t feel right for an Amazon and Sony movie to be actively depicting an exploration of why we shouldn’t let AI technologies infringe on human happenings, particularly as companies like Sony are pushing for the total opposite in patenting AI-led podcasts or in-game manual mechanisms. As anticipated, this respectable, cautionary angle was completely façadal, as the film’s latter half shifts gears into supporting what it just acknowledged as a problem.
Mercy is a movie that literally closes out with the line: “Human or AI, we all make mistakes, and we learn”. Trying to usher us all to leave the theatre excited for a future where we and AI live harmoniously is in such poor taste not only in the face of what the movie began by demonstrating, but also amidst the current state of the world.
As we occupy the birthplace of AI military weapons and machine-led militaristic decision-making, even the notion of suggesting we all work together with the machines is unbelievably distasteful. This movie wants you to believe an AI killing innocents on the battlefield would be all good and fine, because they make mistakes just like us, and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
This ridiculous attempt at fable-making is one of the worst final acts of anything in recent years, and deserves to be either buried 100 miles below our cultural consciousness or serenaded jubilantly on the Razzies stage. While many sci-fi flicks collapse critically under the weight of a half-baked concept or some lacking visuals, not often do we see one that becomes so miserable in its attempt to give us a moral refurbishing. When people pleaded for mercy watching the equal parts laughably bad and frustrating in its transposition in The Electric State, nobody was pleading for this.
Overall, Amazon has followed its utterly atrocious attempt at adapting War of the Worlds with a disasterpiece (directed by the former’s producer, mind you) that feels like the exact same thing, if not larger, more expensive and just worse in every way. Gone are the in-jest laughs at how appalling Ice Cube’s Amazon sci-fi was, replaced here with an overarching feeling of doom as we onlook this insipid pro-AI regurgitation bleeding out onto a lifeless, miserable cinema like a rubbish bin overflowing into the alleyway.
More and more with this type of modern, desolate blockbuster film-making does it feel like we live in a rendition of John Carpenter’s They Live: a landscape overruled by bug-eyed money-chasers using us as their blank slates expected to believe that Mercy is worthwhile, morally valuable entertainment. While I wish I could say it’s a good thing that these message-in-a-bottle miseries and ‘Prattifications’ of science fiction frequently wind up losing over £100 million, it’s actually going to be touted by the out-of-touch executives as a cautionary sign; the ‘death of the cinema’ and so on. Hopefully 2026’s future slate proves that wrong.
I sat down with director Elias Demetriou to talk about his film ‘Maricel’ which follows a Filipino domestic worker in Cyprus caring for an elderly couple who have a lot of unspoken family drama.
