Mercy....Or How To Make a Hot Mess of a Movie

January 2026

 

I can just imagine what went down at that pitch meeting for this sorry ass movie...

 

Let’s get Chris Pratt to play the detective...

 

Yea...

 

He’s hot right now... and he’s pretty apolitical...

So he won’t turn off the flyover country crowd...

 

And he’s looking to expand past his action hero roles...

 

So let’s tie him to a chair.....

 

And not let him get up for the entire movie....

 

He’ll like that.....

 

And we can make him a drunk...

So we’ll have something for the crowd that thinks all cops have issues...

 

But Pratt’s likable enough we can make him a sympathetic character...

Because we are going to need that...

 

And what do you think of having him facing the death penalty for the murder of his wife?

 

Good idea... because executing an innocent man pushes a lot of buttons...

Plus, that ramps up the suspense...

Especially if we give him an unrealistic time limit to prove his innocence...

 

Like 40 minutes?

 

That works...

 

And let’s make the chair he’s tied to throughout the entire movie look like an electric chair...

 

That is going to be used to execute him immediately if he’s found guilty...

 

Good visual....

 

And because he’s tied to it...

He can’t get up to go out and prove his innocence...

 

So it allows us to do that Ironside thing...

Where the clever police detective solves a crime while stuck in a chair...

 

Wait... How old are you?

No one is going to remember Ironside...

 

Let’s keep it anyway...

 

Because we just need a plot device that allows us...

To make Pratt look like some super smart detective...

 

What do you think about throwing in an AI angle?

 

Great idea ...that will make us look tapped in......

Because everyone is paranoid about AI right now...

 

So let’s have it be an AI court that tries Pratt for murder...

And we’ll call it the Mercy Court...

Because who doesn’t love an oxymoron...

 

And it will decide his guilt based on probabilities...

 

You mean like Polymarket?

 

No... ...

We’ll have Agentic AI be the judge and jury...

As well as the prosecution...

 

Ok...I get it...The Singularity ...

 

Cool...

 

And let’s make this court the tool of an authoritarian government...

That is using AI ...

To fight out-of-control crime...

 

 I love that...

 

And that will push some really hot buttons right now...

 

Plus... I think we should make this court part of a larger surveillance state...

With everyone’s ring camera and cell phone gathering warrantless evidence for the state...

 

You mean like China?

 

That’s not very original... but Ok

 

Hey... wait a minute ...

 

I think we might need to throw a bone to the law and order crowd...

 

So let’s include some scenes of homeless camps full of drug addicts...

 

As dystopian Escape from New York No-Go zones...

 

And we can also have someone reading the Anarchist’s Cookbook...

While building a bomb to blow up everyone at the Mercy Court...

That he puts in a truck and then drives to Court...

 

So we can have an OJ Simpson chase scene...

 

I like that...

 

What do you think of having that guy kidnap Pratt’s daughter....

 

Good idea.. Let’s do it...

 

Hold on a minute...

 

Maybe we shouldn’t lean too hard into the Timothy McVeigh angle...

 

So let’s have this guy trying to avenge the death of a friend...

Who was falsely executed by the Mercy Court...

Because he was the victim of police corruption...

That involved hiding evidence...

 

Yea... that’ll sell...

 

Ok...I think we are done here...

 

We now have something for everyone...

 

A smart, but troubled cop...

Scary AI...

A crime ridden city with No-Go zones...

An heavy handed authoritarian government that says it is fighting crime...

A surveillance state...

A looming miscarriage of justice...

And an evil anarchist... who is out to avenge injustice...

That is the result of police corruption...

All done in the name of law and order...

 

And, of course, a bankable star...

 

Are there any ideas we might have missed?

 

I don’t think so...

 

Oh wait....

 

Wouldn’t it be cool if the police could have flying cars...

So they wouldn’t get stuck in LA traffic...

 

Yea... I would love to have one of those...

 

So let’s do it...

 

Ok... is there anything we have left out?

 

Yea...making a decent movie...

 

That doesn’t look like it was the product of one of those skits in The Studio...

That are a send-up of how the suits in Hollywood tinker with a film ...

Until they turn it into a hot mess...

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