Mercy (dir. Timur Bekmambetov)

by Jack Martin | Jan 23, 2026

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 100 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 23 January 2026

WHO’S IN MERCY?

Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan, Kenneth Choi, Kylie Rogers, Rafi Gavron, Jeff Pierre, Tom Rezvan, Ryan Hailey

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Timur Bekmambetov (director, producer), Marco van Belle (writer), Robert Amidon, Majd Nassif and Charles Roven (producers), Khalid Mohtaseb (cinematographer), Austin Keeling and Lam T. Nguyen (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A cop (Pratt) has ninety minutes to prove his innocence to an AI judge (Ferguson)…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON MERCY?

You may know him better for movies like Night Watch, Wanted or even Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s biggest contribution to cinema remains, for better or worse, his pioneering of the cinematic movement known as “screenlife.” This is, of course, where a film’s narrative unfolds entirely from the perspective of various modern technological devices, from phones to computers to bodycams and so on, with Bekmambetov serving as producer on many of them, including Unfriended, Searching, and even last year’s notoriously Amazon-sponsored War of the Worlds.

But despite his proficiency within the genre he helped create, Bekmambetov has only directed two such movies in his career: 2021’s Profile, which used the format for a story of undercover journalism and online radicalisation, and now Mercy, which adopts a more conventional sci-fi cop thriller angle. In both cases, the filmmaker underwhelms with his own approach to the screenlife format, either taking too many liberties with what can and can’t be shown on the screen or failing to follow through on what starts out as an intriguing concept.

Mercy, however, is arguably the bigger offender, for not only does it repeatedly fail to justify its own format, but the story being told is one that just gets sillier and sillier, to where it barely even matters if most of it takes place on a screen or not.

The film is set in 2029 Los Angeles, where to combat growing crime rates there is a new artificially intelligent system put in the place of the regular judicial practices, one that takes the biggest offenders and subjects them to a ninety-minute trial where unless they can prove their innocence within the allotted time, they are found guilty and immediately executed. It’s a concept that, while interesting in theory, does raise some questions about this near-futuristic universe; for instance, although the justice department has effectively been eradicated, surely there must still be a need for lawyers in this scenario, particularly ones who might know the judicial procedures such as how to gather evidence better than the actual criminals being placed on trial?

Anyway, it’s during this exposition dump that we see the latest accused criminal strapped to a chair: police officer Chris Raven (Chris Pratt, who can only do so much whilst sitting down for most of the movie), who’s informed by AI-generated Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) that he’s on trial for the murder of his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis), something that he of course claims to not have done. With the clock ticking, Chris is granted access to whatever files and sources he can to prove his innocence to Maddox and possibly find the true culprit.

Unlike the majority of screentime movies, Mercy is surprisingly lacking in actual screentime. With its (slightly) larger scale and the inclusion of bigger-name actors like Pratt and Ferguson, it is framed more like a conventional film, with all the desktop and smartphone interfaces frequently flashing up on the screen as characters request certain information to further solve the case. However, this does lead to a lot of instances where it will frequently cut between regular shots of the actors and tight zoom-ins on computer files and phone contacts, mixed in with FaceTime footage of other characters operating in other areas.

It’s clearly a film that’s trying to have it both ways, by being this traditionally shot thriller as well as one of these screenlife movies, but both styles of filmmaking don’t really go together as well as Bekmambetov thinks. It ends up creating a rather distracting effect, because you’ll find yourself darting through all these things on the screen before it suddenly cuts to a shot of Ferguson looking directly at you with a rather chilling stare. It’s enough to completely take you out of it, even as you try to absorb all the information that a regular screentime movie would at least allow to be on-screen for a few more seconds, more for audience clarity than anything.

Since it’s not exactly a traditional screenlife movie, you will also find yourself asking questions about certain things that you normally wouldn’t in a film like this. There are pertinent pieces of information that are conveniently captured on camera via people’s phones or other recording equipment, which is the norm for most screenlife or found-footage films since that’s just how the film is structured. But in a more conventionally filmed aesthetic like the one Mercy adopts, it really baffles you as to why anyone was filming all this stuff in the first place, other than for to make it very easy for Pratt to put the pieces of this time-crunched mystery together.

Although, it’s not that much of a mystery to begin with, since it is very easy to figure out who is really behind everything, given how certain figures are introduced and their connections to the main character are established. You end up clocking it long before Pratt does, but by then the film has descended into a climax that sets stakes that are completely ridiculous for this kind of film, while also throwing in last-minute twists that really don’t add up and don’t even need to have been there at all, before concluding on a weirdly hopeful message about the necessity of AI that leaves you expecting the ChatGPT logo and its slogan to pop up at the very end.

While it’s edited together fine, creating a fairly decent pace that makes it go by fast – the film’s own act of mercy upon its audience – Mercy is mostly just a stupid person’s idea of what Minority Report is, failing to grasp either its concept or its screenlife format to memorable, or even intelligent, results.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Mercy is a mercifully short but no less stupid attempt to combine traditional filmmaking with director Timur Bekmambetov’s “screenlife” format but lacks the intelligence or sophistication to stand out as either.