There is a term well known to experienced moviegoers, known as “A January Movie”, where production companies have stored movies that have been marked as either low quality, unlikely to make money, or too bad to even release. January is the time of year when these movies are dumped in movie theaters in an attempt to at least make some of the money back that has already been booked as a financial loss because of a low-quality film idea that just did not work.
The new movie “Mercy” is a great example of a January movie and stars Chris Pratt as police officer Chris Raven and Rebecca Ferguson, who plays an AI Judge named Judge Maddox. In this story, Chris Raven is on trial in front of an AI judge, trying to prove that he is innocent of killing his wife, and he has only 90 minutes. If Raven fails to prove himself innocent, he is immediately put to death.
This entire movie has Chris Raven tied to a chair, sitting in front of Judge Maddox, with hundreds of different videos shown around them in a darkened room. The first thing that you realize is how much money must have been saved producing this film because there is no reason for movie sets or high-quality action scenes – just snippets of low-grade videos. This film was probably greenlighted despite the B-movie script because of a money decision where Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson would make enough box office because the production costs are so low. While the futuristic idea is a good one, with AI taking over the legal system in this country, unfortunately, this screenplay is not up to the task of successfully bringing this idea home.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are a very low and correct 22%. I agree with this rating and rank this movie as a big-time January movie miss.
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 