Wrong Place, Wrong Time | Los Angeles Review of Books
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2FMercy%20-%20Chris%20Pratt.png "Wrong Place, Wrong Time | Los Angeles Review of Books")
Wrong Place, Wrong Time | Los Angeles Review of Books
Publish Date: 2026-07-06 11:03:00
Source Domain: lareviewofbooks.org
A new movie about AI judges serves to expose how film noir was always about a world of artificial intelligence.
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IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before a movie like Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy came down the pike. Released in theaters nationwide on January 23, Mercy is billed as a science fiction thriller. Set in 2029, the film stars Chris Pratt as Detective Chris Raven, an LAPD detective who champions the use of AI criminal judges. Then, one day, Raven is framed for murdering his wife, and his own fate will be determined by the AI judge. He has just 90 minutes to prove his innocence.
With so much discourse devoted to AI—the ethics of its widespread adoption, its incursion into more and more fields of human life and death—Mercy’s plot was almost overdetermined. Someone was going to make this movie. The film even aestheticizes that sense of inevitability. Raven’s trial unfolds nearly in real time, a 90-minute countdown conducted almost entirely through screens, streamed evidence, and interface logic, as though judgment itself had already been reformatted as a time-bound operation of data management. Likewise, the questions posed by the film’s setup are obvious enough: Can we entrust human freedom and punishment to a nonhuman entity? If the (human) justice system is, as we are told, riddled with error and prejudice, then might a machine be better able to render impartial verdicts? Is an AI judiciary the progressive future or a dystopia in waiting?
At bottom, these questions all turn on a central dilemma: whether we’re comfortable relinquishing the human scale—for all its flaws, biases, and partiality—in questions of law and order. Are these…
