"War of the Worlds will inevitably go down as 2025's worst film, with its coveted Metascore of 6 and Rotten Tomato rating of 4. But if you thought that might mean the end of sci-fi movies based around surveillance footage, boy do I have a trailer for you. The first promo for Chris Pratt's MERCY just dropped, and it stinks worse than sewage-filled socks."
"I love/hate everything about this trailer. The central premise is so stunningly stupid: a near-future world where people are tried for crimes by an AI via, um, strapping them into a chair in the middle of a colossal auditorium and then having them scour all surveillance, mobile and TV footage for proof of their innocence, but only with the run-time of a movie to do it all in. Should they fail to evidence their own lack of guilt in 90 minutes, they're instantly murdered."
"LAPD officer (because of course) Pratt has been accused of the murder of his wife. BUT GET THIS! He's also the very guy who designed the MERCY system! What a piece of screenwriting mastery! Will he learn a valuable life-lesson about authoritarianism? Well, given the trailer begins with a murder mystery and appears to end with car chases and an entire city blowing up, I'm going to guess no."
Mercy centers on a near-future justice system where an AI forces accused individuals into an auditorium to review all surveillance, mobile and TV footage to prove innocence within a movie-length time limit. Failure to do so results in instantaneous execution. The protagonist is an LAPD officer accused of murdering his wife, who also happens to have designed the MERCY system. The film mixes murder mystery elements with car chases and citywide destruction. Rebecca Ferguson portrays an AI. The premise is portrayed as implausible and tonally unironical, and the execution is criticized as thin and sensationalist.
Read at Kotaku
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