CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

“Mercy:” Judge Maddox Will See You Now

Poster art for the movie Mercy directed by Marco van Belle – Fair Use

The Chair Is Already Built

There is a moment early in Mercy, Timur Bekmambetov’s Amazon MGM techno-thriller, when Detective Christopher Raven—played by a sweaty, straining Chris Pratt— is strapped into what the film calls the Mercy Chair. He is accused of murdering his wife. The evidence is overwhelming: her blood was found on his clothes, and doorbell camera footage placed him at the scene. Presiding over his case is Judge Maddox — not a human being but an AI rendered on an oversized screen as Rebecca Ferguson, cool and expressionless and algorithmically serene. Raven has ninety minutes to prove his innocence. His guilt probability, displayed in real time for the audience, sits at 97.5%. If he cannot drive it below 92%, he dies. He passes away in the chair itself. No appeals. No jury. No second chances.

It is meant to be frightening. And it is—but not quite for the reasons the filmmakers intended.

What Bekmambetov and screenwriter Marco van Belle have made is a thriller that stumbles onto one of the most urgent political questions of our moment and then flinches. Mercy wants to interrogate AI justice. By the final reel, the film endorses this theme. The machine makes a mistake—but so do humans, the film shrugs, and anyway, the system mostly works. Detective Raven, it turns out, was one of the architects of the Mercy Court. He championed it. And when it nearly kills him, his response—and the film’s—is chastened reconciliation. AI is our friend. It just needs a little fine-tuning. Blech!

This is some pukey propaganda. You almost prefer the jackbooted, torch-lit kind—the comfortable, popcorn-flavored kind that Amazon MGM does so well. It matters, because the Mercy Chair is not merely science fiction: It’s essentially here. The film places the technology in Los Angeles, 2029, but it was first field-tested in Gaza, right now, at this moment, while you read this. But before Gaza, there were the Terror Tuesdays in Washington.

Terror Tuesday and the American Pedigree

Techno-fascism was at work before Trump. It was engineered, carefully and methodically, under a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Every Tuesday, Barack Obama convened what insiders called Terror Tuesday—a gathering in which the President of the United States reviewed a set of playing cards bearing photographs and dossiers of men the administration had designated for assassination. The President himself selected who would die that week. His aides called it the disposition matrix, a bureaucratic euphemism so bloodless it might have been lifted from a software manual. It was, in effect, an early-version kill list algorithm—human-curated but operating on precisely the same logic of profiling, risk-scoring, and authorized execution that would later be automated in Gaza.

One of those playing cards bore the face of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen. On September 30, 2011, a CIA drone killed him without trial, without indictment, without any judicial process whatsoever. This despite family pleas to the Obama administration to spare his life. Two weeks later, another drone struck a group of young men gathered around an outdoor grill. Among those killed was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, sixteen years old, born in Denver, Colorado. He had gone to Yemen looking for his father. He found a missile instead. The others at that barbecue—his friends, his age, eating with him—have no names recorded anywhere. They were data points cleared from the screen.

Strip the names away, and the story becomes something older. A father killed by a machine that had decided he was a threat. A son, a boy, who went looking for him and was killed too, at a meal with his friends, by a machine that registered bodies in proximity to a target. The father and the son. What makes Obama’s version of this more frightening than anything Trump has improvised, and it was precisely systematic. Crazy evil makes noise, draws resistance, and burns itself out. Systematic evil writes policy, classifies the documentation, and retires with its security clearance intact. (Not to be outdone by Obama, Trump managed to have al-Awaki’s 8-year-old daughter, Nawar, murdered in a commando raid in Yemen.)

Obama also refined the double-tap: strike a target, then strike again when rescuers arrive. Strike a wedding. Then strike the funeral. The double-tap is not merely a military tactic. It is a social message. It tells every community within drone range that grief itself is dangerous, that gathering to mourn the dead makes you a potential target. This is torture at the population level — the kind of predatory watching I have examined in published work in the Torture Journal. The gaze that is waiting for permission to strike is not passive observation. It is an ongoing assault against everyone who knows the drone is overhead. And the disposition matrix that directed those drones did not stay in Yemen. It came home, as these things always do.

III. What the Film Is, and What It Does

Let’s be fair to Mercy as a film before we autopsy it as ideology.

Bekmambetov is the pioneer of what critics call the screenlife format—films told entirely through device interfaces: phone cameras, laptop screens, drone feeds, doorbell cams, and surveillance footage. His earlier films Searching and Profile used the format well. Here, the trial unfolds in real time across ninety minutes of screen-mediated evidence gathering, and at its best it does generate dread. The setup has genuine dramatic promise: a detective strapped to a chair, his guilt probability ticking upward, the city’s Municipal Cloud giving him access to every camera and database in Los Angeles to mount his own defense.

Rebecca Ferguson is doing something intriguing in a role that gives her almost nothing physical to work with. She is a talking head, a chatbot with cheekbones—and yet when Maddox glitches, recalibrates, and begins to improvise beyond her programming, Ferguson makes you feel the uncanny wrongness of it. This performance is what the movie could have been. Pratt, on the other hand, is a problem. His physicality drives his best performances, and a ninety-minute close-up of a man arguing with a screen tests the limits of his range. He tries hard. You can........

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