Pratt's AI Movie Bombs With Worst Reviews in Decade

Chris Pratt's latest venture into science fiction has crashed and burned with critics just days before hitting theaters nationwide. The Guardians of the Galaxy actor teams up with Mission: Impossible's Rebecca Ferguson in Mercy, an AI courtroom thriller that's earning some of the harshest reviews of Pratt's career.

The film drops Pratt into a futuristic nightmare where his detective character faces trial for murdering his wife. He gets exactly 90 minutes to convince an AI judge of his innocence. Ferguson plays the artificial intelligence deciding his fate.

Critics Slam Unoriginal Approach

Despite artificial intelligence dominating headlines across America, reviewers say Mercy brings nothing new to the conversation. The movie recycles ideas from sci-fi classics like Minority Report and Blade Runner without adding fresh perspective.

"The film isn't aggressively bad, it's just really dumb. It borrows the aesthetic of superior sci-fi films, without grasping the soul of the genre," HeyUGuys critic Linda Marric wrote. The Film Verdict's Alonso Duralde went further, claiming the movie "purports to be a cautionary tale about putting legal justice into the hands of AI, but the movie's real agenda is promoting the surveillance state as a way of fighting crime."

Harsh Words for Execution

The criticism extends beyond concept to execution. Toronto Star's Peter Howell described the film as "lazily written, chaotically directed and played out with all the zest of a convenience-store security video."

IndieWire's Wilson Chapman echoed those sentiments: "The work of everyone involved – from the sleepy performances to the crew doing an okay but never exemplary job – suggests a first draft, a sense of wanting to get the thing out and move on."

Few Bright Spots

Not every reviewer completely dismissed the thriller. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw found some merit, calling Mercy "ingenious and watchable stuff, with cheeky twists, although the final escalation to full-on action mayhem is maybe a step too far towards pure absurdity."

Variety's Owen Gleiberman offered faint praise, concluding "the movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect."

The damage shows in the numbers. Mercy currently sits at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 44 professional reviews. For Pratt, this marks his lowest-rated film in nearly 13 years, since the widely panned anthology Movie 43. Ferguson faces similar embarrassment with her worst reviews since 2017's The Snowman.

Mercy opens in theaters January 23.