Rebecca Ferguson | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

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.

The new movie “Reminiscence”, starring Hugh Jackman is one of those rare bad movies that it is extremely hard to review, because it is so bad. I have often wondered, how many bad movies can a very famous actor can make before their career goes south? Without a doubt, this is the worst movie Hugh Jackman has ever made, so bad that its impossible to understand how he could have read the script and agreed to act in this film. I have always known that there are actor/studio contracts that are signed and favors that are agreed to in Hollywood. I have seen way too many movies like this one, where a named actor has made a movie that they should have known from the script, was too bad to make.

The plot is absurd, the story starting sometime in the future, with the city of Miami completely flooded because of Global Warming. In the future, there is a machine that can read peoples brain waves displaying their thoughts on a computer screen. This idea reminded me of the 1983 movie “Brainstorm”, the last movie for Natalie Wood. In that movie, they were able to record brain images for people at the moment they died, resulting in some memorable scenes and a pretty good film. In this movie, the main character Nick Bannister played by Jackman is trying to find out what has happened to his girlfriend Mae, played by Rebecca Ferguson, by using this brain wave machine. Actress Thandiwe Newton plays Emily, Nick’s friend who throughout this film, tries to talk him out of everything he is doing. Admittedly while watching this film on HBO Max, I fast-forwarded the movie too many times, at 15 second intervals, because this movie was so hard to sit through.

By the time you are 85% through this very bad movie, you are more interested in it ending, than ever caring enough to fully understand what is happening in this very poorly told story.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is an extremely low 37%, and I agree with this assessment, suggesting that this movie should just die in a DVD graveyard.