Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

While barely hanging on by a thread as my snow prison sentence has been extended by another day (school was canceled for tomorrow yet again), I finally got back on the road and—naturally—went straight to the theater. Mercy was on the docket today, and by the looks of the trailers, it was going to be as “January movie” as possible. I was a little surprised by how much I liked it, though, even if it still had its fair share of huge whiffs.

Mercy was, at its simplest, a movie where the story far outclassed the craft, which began with the terrible idea to strap the star of this action-thriller to a chair for nearly the entire runtime. Chris Pratt did just about everything he could to make his performance dramatic and emotional, but it unfortunately fell pretty flat. Most performances in this film felt off, especially Rebecca Ferguson, an actress whom I usually love. She played AI kind of convincingly, but her slips into human emotion and her sporadic stares into space really threw me off. Honestly, that may have been AI Rebecca Ferguson; the jury’s still out.

I was actually pretty gripped by the premise, especially in the first hour. The task of proving one’s innocence with the entire city’s data at your fingertips made for a detailed and complex crime thriller, though it would likely make an even better video game. While it probably would’ve been cooler to be on the ground for much of this action, rather than accessing it digitally from a dark room, I’ll admit that the case had me hooked. What also posed as a pro-AI film instead subverted that claim by the end, while also having a few interesting things to say about law enforcement. An auspicious time in the history of our country for this film to come out, no doubt.

As the evidence mounted and the stakes were raised in the third act, the film got a bit too big for its britches. The eventual culprit made a lot of sense, but there was one too many twists to get there, and I nearly got lost in it all. I also wasn’t a big fan of where the blame eventually fell, because I felt the story with [original crime’s culprit] was more interesting. At the end of the day, though, Mercy was more fun than I had expected, even with its sizable aesthetic and performative missteps. There’s no way that Mercy sits in my top 50 of 2026 by year’s end, but I’ve had worse starts to a year. Let’s get Chris up and moving for the next one, though!