A few years ago, I wrote a Collider piece entitled “How Chris Pratt lost his way as a leading man.” The thesis was that Pratt, once so funny as a supporting character actor, was now delivering the most generic leading man turns in movies like Passengers and The Tomorrow War. Any comedic distinctiveness once permeating his on-screen presence has evaporated as Pratt embraced a stoic, lifeless persona.

Egotistically, I’ll forever believe Chris Pratt’s latest star vehicle, Mercy, emerged after this Jurassic World veteran read my prose. “If Lisa Laman thinks I’ve been phoning it in as a leading man, I’ll show her!” Pratt bellowed at his laptop, like Scarlet declaring she’ll “never go hungry again” in Gone with the Wind, “I’ll star in the most boring crime thriller imaginable! She has no idea the depths of my monotony!”

If this is remotely true, I apologize to the moviegoing public. Like Oppenheimer staring at that pond, I had no clue what my actions would wrought.

Mercy sees Pratt playing Detective Chris Raven, a Los Angeles Police Department Officer who awakens in an ominous chair. Before this day, Raven’s been one of the staunchest advocates for an AI-driven court system, named Mercy. This program keeps suspects confined to a seat for 90 minutes, during which they must prove their innocence or suffer execution once time runs out. The hunter has become the hunted, as Raven now must prove his innocence.

As virtual entity Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) explains, Raven apparently murdered his wife, Nicole Raven (Annabelle Wallis). All the clues point to this tormented officer slaughtering his lover…but naturally, there’s more going on here. With access to all cameras and electronic devices situated across this dystopian Los Angeles, Chris Raven hunts for clues against the clock. Is there another culprit hiding in plain sight? Could this man’s name be cleared? How much longer until this film ends?

Mercy director Timur Bekmambetov loves the ScreenLife subgenre. This concerns titles like Unfriended and Profile transpiring entirely on a computer screen. His translation of Marco van Belle’s script keeps that fixation alive. Much of this title occurs through body-cam footage, security camera imagery, and various phone screens Raven pulls up. Bekmambetov, though, fails to fully commit to this visual motif. Frequently, the camera will awkwardly cut from a point-of-view angle to a generic wide shot for no rhyme or reason.

The lack of precision in these visual elements speaks to how little personality Mercy has as an entire movie. Everything is either devoid of much life or kept reminding me of other motion pictures. Flat ScreenLife-heavy sequences just made me wish I was rewatching Searching. Meanwhile, any lengthy first-person action skirmishes come off like a subpar version of a similar set piece in The Brothers Grimsby (the greatest insult you can hand a movie). Even Judge Maddox is a rehash of so many other AI/robot characters in American cinema, right down to her confusion over what a “joke” or phrases like “thinking out loud” mean.

There’s plenty of time to think, “oh, this superior movie did that better,” considering Mercy spends its runtime focusing on Chris Pratt strapped to a chair. Several actors can anchor a one-person motion picture, like Robert Redford or Kaitlyn Dever. Pratt is not one of them. That’s especially true given his middle school play-acting chops inhabiting a troubled, alcoholic cop. Stripped of his hands and legs for the entirety of Mercy, Andy Dwyer resorts to persistent yelling and constantly moist eyeballs to sell intensity. Neither tactic works. A more restrained role doesn’t open up new talents for this actor. It instead underscores how out of his depth he is as a dramatic leading man.

Pratt’s miscalculated and monotonous performance encapsulates a movie that constantly had me wondering, “who on Earth is this for?” Surely it’s for that dude Steven Soderbergh saw on an airplane 13 years ago, a white guy in his mid-30s watching “five and a half hours of just mayhem porn” compiled from various action films. Yet, for those viewers, Mercy won’t engage the senses. It’s too dry. There’s far too much inert screentime dedicated to phone screens and lame exposition between even hints of explosions to captivate those moviegoers. On balance, Mercy has only slightly more hand-to-hand skirmishes as Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

This isn’t even an exercise in bold visual ideas, like Neveldine/Taylor’s late 2000s trashy titles like Crank. Mercy is far too timid in its imagery-based impulses, as seen by its lack of commitment to the ScreenLife gimmick. Bekmambetov’s camerawork capturing a captive Raven remains stagnant, no matter how imminent his demise gets. The repetitive shot choices and generic sources of melodrama will put people to sleep, not inspire racing pulses. Failing as either popcorn entertainment or something more audacious, Mercy is insultingly empty cinema.

The only function it serves is reinforcing perceptions that Los Angeles is overrun by hordes of “intimidating” unhoused people. In Mercy’s vision of this city circa. 2029, “criminals” and folks living in tents have been quarantined to various “Red Zone’s”. Going inside them is suicide. Chris Pratt’s latest star vehicle does work as obliviously cruel fan-fiction for middle-aged people getting all their Los Angeles information from Bill Maher and Joe Rogan. If you see all unfamiliar people as criminals in waiting, maybe this will resonate with you.

Even on that dehumanizing front, though, Mercy doesn’t click. The “Red Zone’s” prove superfluous to the storyline. Most of the time, Raven’s fellow LAPD officers walk and fly around what looks like a normal Los Angeles. It’s just an incongruous detail encapsulating how the script is too in love with exposition and world-building rather than entertainment. Mercy can’t even do fear-mongering right!

Even the smaller details here, like another phoned-in blockbuster movie score from Ramin Djawadi (his presence being the kiss of death for anyone hoping for inspired cinematic music), underwhelm. At least Mercy runs less than 100 minutes before the credits kick in. Granted, that’s the very definition of fainting with damn praise. Once more, Chris Pratt has tediously proven how far he’s fallen as a leading man. To quote a wise Ian Malcom, “boy, do I hate being right all the time.”

Mercy blasts into movie theaters everywhere on January 23, 2026.