Mercy (2026)

Mercy arrives with a premise that has been sitting in the Hollywood warehouse since Minority Report, dusted off and fitted with a timer. In 2029 Los Angeles, an AI judge named Maddox presides over a court that executes defendants by sonic blast if they cannot lower their guilt probability inside ninety minutes. Chris Pratt plays the detective strapped to the chair, accused of killing his wife, and Timur Bekmambetov films the ordeal in his favored screenlife grammar, all doorbell cameras and body cams and drones. The machinery hums. The tension does not.

For all the dystopian furniture, the film has little interest in arguing with it. The cast includes Kali Reis as the detective's partner and Kenneth Choi and Jeff Pierre in supporting turns, but the movie never organizes itself around representation as a thesis. Ferguson's AI judge occupies real authority, and Reis gets to command a SWAT response, though the script treats this as staffing, not statement. The criminal justice machinery is never racialized, and the surveillance state here is bureaucratic and technological, not corporate, so there is no appetite for an eat-the-rich sermon. No climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent framing of the hero's alcoholism. His drinking is just drinking.

What remains is a film that gestures at AI dependency, privacy invasion, and state control without ever pressing the argument. Critics noticed. The result is a near-future thriller that wants credit for the questions it raises and none of the work of answering them. It is a police-state dystopia presented as an agreeable norm, which is either a failure of nerve or an accidental confession. Either way, the lecture never arrives. The chair does.