Amazon-MGM has sneaked the cyber thriller Mercy onto Prime Video. In 2026, its perspective on AI and state violence looks woefully out of step… Following an ill-fated tour of IMAX screens in early 2026, the cyber-thriller Mercy quietly made its debut on Prime Video over the weekend in the UK. It’s the final resting place ... Mercy | An AI thriller made at least a decade too late, is now on Prime Video
Amazon-MGM has sneaked the cyber thriller Mercy onto Prime Video. In 2026, its perspective on AI and state violence looks woefully out of step…
Following an ill-fated tour of IMAX screens in early 2026, the cyber-thriller Mercy quietly made its debut on Prime Video over the weekend in the UK. It’s the final resting place for director Timur Bekmambetov’s latest screenlife opus – a saggy collection of ideas that feels like it should have emerged in cinemas a decade ago.
Filmmaking being the slow, labour-intensive industry it often is, movies often take years to go from script to cinema. In the interim, fashions can change. Tastes change. What was uncontroversial one year can become a hot-button topic the next.
In the case of Mercy, producer Charles Roven might have assumed he was making a fairly routine action-thriller – a showcase for Hollywood star Chris Pratt to flex his acting musles. What he ended up with looks, from a 2026 perspective, somewhat more murky and ill-concieved than any of its makers probably intended.
When work began on turning screenwriter Marco van Belle’s concept into a movie around four years ago, Roven told ComicBookMovie, “People were talking about AI, but not like what’s happening now. So all of a sudden, when we were in post-production of the movie, it just exploded, and I’m going, ‘Well, this couldn’t be more relevant than today.’”
Far from being of the moment, however, Mercy instead feels like a relic from a bygone age. Perhaps that’s why, after its money-losing cinema release in January (in 3D on some screens), the cyber thriller has quietly made its debut on Prime Video in the UK.
Pratt stars as Chris Raven, an alcoholic detective accused of murdering his wife. He has no memory of the night before, and insists that he’s innocent – but as the evidence is put in front of him, it looks like an open-and-shut case. He and his wife had argued before she was killed; his DNA is all over the domestic crime scene; Raven was subsequently found in a bar, drunk and behaving aggressively.
The twist here is that it’s 2029, and Los Angeles, overwhelmed by a crime wave, has taken to using AI to solve its problems. An initiative called the Mercy Capital Court has been set up to expedite murder cases, with an artificially-intelligent judge used to essentially speedrun the course of justice (the court’s motto: “Swift justice for all!”).
Defendants are strapped to a chair, given an information blast of evidence, and then allowed 90 minutes to exonerate themselves; if they can’t, then they’re automatically executed.
A further twist: Detective Raven was previously one of Mercy’s big proponents, and used it to prosecute (and summarily execute) a murderer in a much-publicised test case. And so, irony of ironies, Raven finds himself having to navigate the terrifying legal system he helped put in place.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, Mercy is the latest in a string of the filmmaker’s ‘screenlife’ thrillers – low-budget, high-concept yarns that take place almost entirely through a mobile phone interface or laptop monitor. In such films as Unfriended (2015), Searching (2018) and Missing (2023), we see the central characters resolve their predicaments by fiddling around with social media apps and moving pointers around crisp user interfaces.
Bekmambetov was producer on all those films, and for a while, they felt like a logical response to a modern world where much of our lives takes place inside shiny devices. With 2025’s War Of The Worlds, however, there was the sense of a bunch of filmmakers kicking against the restraints they’d set themselves. Directed by Rich Lee and starring Ice Cube, it tried to stage an alien invasion – complete with city-wide destruction and battle sequences – through the confines of a computer screen.
The results were truly, bafflingly awful.
Mercy isn’t quite as bad as that (there’s less product placement, for one thing), but it suffers from many of the same problems. The vast percentage of the film focuses on Chris Pratt’s haggard face and his panicked interactions with an all-digital court system – combing through CCTV footage, phone records, and so forth. But then it also tries to throw in some action stuff, with True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis playing a roving cop who flies around LA on her hover bike, chasing suspects and generally being a bad-ass. All of which builds to a frankly ludicrous finale that feels like the product of a late script rewrite.
Leaving aside the rushed, CGI iffiness of those action scenes, they arguably distract from the core concept, which is solid if familiar. There are occasional sparks of intrigue as Raven spars with the AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson, saddled with an uncomfortable-feeling American accent) and tries to find the one shred of evidence that might prove his innocence.
Take away the sci-fi veneer, and Mercy could have come from the 1940s or 50s. The idea of a protagonist waking up accused of murder is the stuff of numerous noir thrillers, including 1947’s A Lonely Place (about a violent screenwriter accused of killing a woman he met the night before) and 1953’s The Blue Gardenia (a switchboard operator is accused of beating to death a sleazy artist).
There’s nothing wrong with revisiting old ideas, of course, and on paper, Mercy could have used hoary noir staples to tell a modern story about crime and punishment. The problem is, the film’s makers aren’t at all interested in interrogating the technology that lies at the heart of their thriller – a use of AI that isn’t a million miles away from its deployment in the real world here in 2026.
That a citizen’s every move is diligently recorded and catalogued, ready to be used against them should it be needed at a later date, is barely given a second thought. That California circa 2029 is in a crime meltdown, and that a police state has risen in response, is presented as a minor plot point and quickly glossed over.
Much like Minority Report, Steven Spielberg’s big-screen rendering of Philip K Dick’s short story, Mercy uses its premise as a jumping off point for an action thriller. But Spielberg’s film did so while also investigating the disturbing implications of a surveillance state where, with the help of technology (and a bit of psychic hocus pocus) citizens are arrested in anticipation of crimes they haven’t yet committed.
Minority Report probes at a system, finds it rotten, and has it torn down. Mercy prods at a system’s periphery, finds some bugs that need ironing out, but half-arsedly concludes that, hey, “we all make mistakes.”
(We could also pick all sorts of holes in the Mercy system’s logic. A defendant’s ability to call and interrogate seemingly anyone would be an ethical and legal minefield in the real world.)
When Mercy dribbled into cinemas earlier this year, there were some accusations that it might be pro-AI or even a piece of copaganda. I’d humbly submit that it isn’t intentionally trying to be either of those things. Instead, it’s guilty of the crime of being woefully out of step with current events.
It harks back to a time when there might have been a wider audience for a Chris Pratt star vehicle, before he was dubbed the ‘worst Hollywood Chris’ and came out with strange revelations, like his refusal to allow his kids to watch movies – possibly because he doesn’t want them to see Mercy). It harks back to a time where audiences might have been lured to the cinema to watch a B-movie by the promise of a bit of eye-popping 3D.
More egregiously, Mercy hails from a time when it was easier to take on subjects like AI, authoritarianism and state-imposed violence without taking a side. We now live in an era where tech firms appear dead-set on asset stripping the entire human race through generative AI. Where the AI tool Claude was allegedly used in military bombing campaigns, with horrifying results, and where Palantir’s AI tech and Meta’s AI glasses are being used by ICE agents to arrest people on the streets of America.
In this climate, Mercy emerges as something other than the cheesy, breezy evening’s entertainment its makers might have intended. The horrifying future it blithely hand-waves away is already here.
