I can’t go anywhere without hearing some kind of AI-related thread. It comes up in conversations with my colleagues at UDC. When I tell a non-academic I teach writing, the first question: “What do you think about AI?” The short answer: it’s here to stay, so we have to work with it. The film, Mercy, seems to take the opposite argument. The concept is amazing. A cop, accused of murdering his wife, is taken to trial in an AI-run courtroom. The judge is a bot, and he has ninety minutes to prove his innocence. He has full access to every cell phone in Los Angeles to gather evidence, and if the probability of his guilt falls below 92%, he’s a free man.
Now the pro-single part: we see a beautiful wedding, a child, and marital bliss in the beginning. But then the defendant ss shown to have suffered a trauma caused by watching his partner (in the police sense, not the romantic) be shot. From there, he starts drinking and becoming a lout to his wife, Nicole, and his daughter, Britt. We see it in flashbacks where he throws things around in the house, and eventually, Nicole files for divorce. Even Britt is bugged out by her “crazy Dad.” It’s revealed at one point that Nicole was having an affair. “I gave her what you couldn’t,” the dude said. “You should have been there for your wife and daughter.”
At first glance, it looks like Chris has killed his wife. A security camera shows him going inside his home, begging for Nicole to take him back, and staying for twenty-six minutes. At the end of that time span, Nicole is dead. SPOILER ALERT: Of course, Chris is innocent. But he’s fallen victim to the toxic masculinity that pervades men. Not sharing his emotions. And if he hadn’t gotten married in the first place, he might not be on trial. And Nicole would be alive.
But then we’d have no movie, and I wouldn’t be able to write about it.