If Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was an early contender for funniest comedy of the year, Mercy presents a curious bit of counter-programming: an early contender for the unintentionally funniest comedy of the year.

Leaning on the utterly toothless performance of Chris Pratt, who spends the majority of the movie strapped to a chair, Mercy serves the terrible reputation of January new releases well. In the film, Pratt plays the hero, Chris Raven: a sad-sack homicide detective who has relapsed into alcoholism and is abusive to his wife. After a night he can’t remember, Raven awakes to an experimental AI (which takes on the image of a steely Rebecca Ferguson) being used to adjudicate crime, a literal judge, jury, and execution with unilateral power to kill the accused if the defendant cannot prove reasonable doubt.

In this near future, accused criminals are guilty until proven innocent, and have been stripped of the constitutional right to a jury of one’s peers. Raven, who ironically helped send people to this AI execution chair, now finds himself on the other side of the law. He needs to prove that he did not murder his wife within a 90-minute time limit (a convenient amount of time for a slim movie operating in pseudo-real-time).

The premise is silly; the execution is sillier. Artificial zooms added in post attempt to add stakes to compositions that are visually inert by design (Pratt looks at screens, and Ferguson appears like she is gazing out into an empty void). Occasionally, Timur Bekmambetov adds visual flourishes by dropping the sedentary Pratt into more dynamic settings. It’s not enough to make the film feel dynamic, though.

Aside from being boring and improbably lacking in any material substance regarding the of-the-moment subjects it is engaging with (surveillance states, artificial intelligence, modern policing), the ultimate resolution of these subjects is painfully idiotic. Painful, I suppose, because I risked busting a gut from laughing so hard at its complete inability to read the room when it comes to the exact thing it sets up to critique.

The film spends most of its time circling endlessly around a single hypothetical—should artificial intelligence be used to do important civil jobs formerly reserved for humans. Bafflingly, it is decided late in the film that our detective (very bad at his job, incidentally) and the AI model (pretty bad at being an AI, frankly) will team up in order to take down a blue collar worker whose brother was definitively murdered by the State (incompetently depicted as incompetent). This results in an absolute minefield of ideological stupidity. But thankfully it appears that no one making this movie thought too hard about any of it, as the film quickly resolves this poor climax and releases the audience from their chairs.

It is too early in the year to make any pronouncements about “worst movie of the year” this and “this made me want to gouge my eyes out with a plastic fork” that. So I’ll suffice to say this: Mercy is worse than any movie I saw last year, which is saying something, as one of the most ill-conceived movies ever produced came out last year. Both films are produced by Bekmambetov, incidentally. A pattern emerges.

Mercy: F

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd)