Mercy

The basic idea is more interesting than the film's first impression suggests. At first, all the screens, percentages, data and technological language felt somewhat heavy to me. Everything seems too mechanical and cold, as if the film were more interested in showing off its device than in drawing us into the story. But gradually it begins to work much better.
Timur Bekmambetov builds the thriller around a genuinely unsettling question: what happens when we trust data so completely that we begin treating it as synonymous with truth? The system can access cameras, messages, social media, locations and almost every digital trace imaginable. On paper, that sounds like a perfect way to eliminate human error. The problem is that data still requires interpretation, and that is where Mercy becomes most interesting.
Chris Pratt carries much of the film while effectively trapped inside that mechanism. I would not call it one of his strongest performances, but he conveys the feeling of fighting against something that appears to know everything about him. Rebecca Ferguson works at the opposite extreme: cold, measured and almost entirely dehumanized. That distance suits the character and reinforces the sense that you are not arguing with a person, but trying to persuade a system.
The film improves once it stops explaining its world so much and starts genuinely playing with the investigation. That is when the thriller emerges: contradictions, details taking on different meanings and a race against time that finally generates tension. That was when I became much more engaged. The technological device stops being decoration and becomes a narrative tool.
I do not think, however, that the film fully explores the possibilities of its own premise. There was room for a much more disturbing reflection on surveillance, privacy, the presumption of innocence and the delegation of judicial decisions to artificial intelligence. Bekmambetov touches on all of those ideas, but usually chooses momentum over depth. As a meditation on AI, it falls somewhat short; as a thriller, it works considerably better.
It also suffers from the familiar problem of films that begin with a relatively contained idea and then feel compelled to keep increasing the spectacle. The more it tries to become a large-scale action movie, the less interesting it is to me than when it simply places a human being in front of a machine that claims to understand the truth better than they do.
Even so, I ended up feeling much more positive than I did at the beginning. The opening felt heavy and overly concerned with its own gimmick, but once I became involved in the investigation, it drew me in. It is neither a great dystopia nor an especially deep reflection on artificial intelligence, but it has an appealing premise, generates tension and ultimately works as entertainment. An uneven film that clearly improves as it goes along.