Accountants and Accountability

In the very near future, open-and-shut murder cases will be tried by an AI with access to everything that can be known. Defendants are strapped into a chair, with 90 minutes to plead their case; if they cannot convince the AI of reasonable doubt, the chair will execute them – humanely, of course – by disrupting their brain function with a sonic pulse.

Sounds perfect, right? Computers never make mistakes! Also this particular computer is a pretty lady! But what if the pretty computer lady can’t see the whole picture? What if that nice Chris Pratt was a cop trying to convince the pretty computer lady he’s been framed for his wife’s brutal murder? We like Chris Pratt, don’t we? What then?

Welcome to Mercy, a shiny dystopian spin on Minority Report and The Fugitive without the fugitive part; rather than going on the run after being framed, this movie’s hero is stuck in a chair for his entire trial, frantically searching surveillance cameras, phone logs and e-mail accounts to speedrun his wife’s murder investigation while the computer lady, Judge Maddox – played by Rebecca Ferguson with very serious hair and a fluctuating accent – acts as both prosecutor and defense attorney, telling Pratt’s Detective Chris Raven what is and isn’t admissible. Because even though the whole point of the Mercy Court is that it’s designed to convict people who are obviously guilty, thus saving the Los Angeles criminal justice system a lot of time and money, its algorithm still seeks the truth.

Paul Verhoeven could have knocked this out of the park, I think; Mercy’s central idea of a hungover cop trying to argue his way out of a murder conviction and death sentence is almost a RoboCop sequel in itself. But Timur Bekmambetov is not interested in the satirical possibilities of a wrong-man thriller set within a near-future police state; he sees it as another way to push his Screenlife cinema, in which the audience experiences the story through the phone, laptop and GoPro visuals accessible to the characters. Mercy adds another level of immersion by allowing Judge Maddox to reconstruct crime scenes from accumulated data, Holodeck style, placing Detective Raven inside the murder scene and a couple of other locations to examine virtual evidence. And all the while, the clock is ticking down.

That’s pretty much all there is to Mercy. Pratt makes a lot of anguished faces as Raven desperately scrapes the internet, screens whizzing around him while he watches apparently damning video of a drunken argument with his late wife (Annabelle Wallis, wasted) and tries to convince their daughter (Kylie Rogers) that he couldn’t possibly be a murderer. He’s also checking in with his partner Jaq Diallo (True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis), who’s flying around L.A. in a one-person helicopter-motorcycle-drone thing, chasing down leads that might exonerate Raven. It’s 2029! Technology is awesome and Donald Trump probably isn’t President anymore!

Bekmambetov, who started out as a purveyor of enthusiastic genre pictures (Night Watch, Wanted, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) before stumbling with an empty remake of Ben-Hur and pivoting to the Screenlife deal, brings a charged-up, overexcited vibe to Mercy that almost makes up for its mechanical plotting and one-dimensional characters. Chris Pratt can be a lot of fun, even when playing an overmatched hero, but not here; he doesn’t have anything to play beyond agitation and panic, even once Raven starts to persuade Judge Maddox he might not be the killer. Ferguson is even less expressive, playing Maddox as dispassionate and logical, with mild curiosity as her only character trait. (She’s basically a Vulcan, except that Vulcans sometimes think they’re funny.)

I will allow that Mercy was probably more fun in IMAX 3D, where the effects would have been a lot more immersive – though the rapid cutting of the Screenlife aesthetic would also have given half the audience migraines long before the credits roll. No 3D option is available on home video, but the 4K disc offers a bright, clear and razor-sharp 2160p/24 presentation with enveloping Atmos audio. (This is a movie with a lot of whooshing, if that makes any sense.)

This is also the first theatrical title from Amazon MGM Studios to be released on disc under a distribution deal with Alliance Entertainment, and the quality bodes very well for the upcoming 4K and Blu-ray editions of Crime 101 and Project Hail Mary. I’m just hoping the lack of supplements is specific to this movie, rather than an indication of Amazon’s approach to physical media: If nothing else, the world needs more Phil Lord and Chris Miller audio commentaries.

The week’s other new release, at least technically, is Ray McKinnon’s 2007 comedy Randy and the Mob, arriving on Blu-ray for the first time. And this one does offer supplements – specifically The Accountant, the Oscar-winning short writer-director McKinnon made in 2001 with his wife Lisa Blount, who’d co-starred in An Officer and a Gentleman and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and McKinnon’s fellow character actor Walton Goggins. The trio formed a production company, Ginny Mule Pictures, and went on to make two features together: Chrystal, a mostly forgotten thriller with Billy Bob Thornton, and Randy, a comedy that remixes the basic premise of The Accountant and builds it out to feature length – and plays things much more broadly.

The Accountant featured McKinnon in the titular role, playing a neurodivergent stranger who arrives in a small town to help a man claw his way out of financial ruin. Eddie King was the struggling farmer, with Goggins as his more successful brother; Randy casts Goggins as the more aggressively autistic-coded Mafia fixer Tino Armani, with McKinnon in the dual role of Randy, an overextended entrepreneur, and Randy’s brother Cecil, who runs an antique shop.

Oscar or no Oscar, The Accountant demonstrated that McKinnon made the right choice switching out the leads for Randy. Goggins is much more entertaining in the more mannered role; McKinnon played his Accountant with pancake makeup and an unblinking seriousness, while Goggins gives Tino a kind of mental time delay, as though he’s practicing his responses in his head before he speaks. McKinnon gets to play both Randy’s desperation and Cecil’s irritation with his brother; the only other actor who’s had this much fun being passive-aggressive with himself is Sam Rockwell in Moon.

The feature also offers McKinnon the opportunity to open the story up, with Blount and DeKay as Ray and Cecil’s respective partners and Brent Briscoe, Bill Nunn, Paul Ben-Victor and Burt Reynolds popping up as various eccentric supporting characters.

And if Randy and the Mob leans a little too hard on the wackiness in its last act, it does so with the best of intentions. McKinnon loves his characters and wants them to be happy, even if that means they land in the shit every now and then.

Lightyear Entertainment’s Blu-ray of Randy and the Mob is, like its February release of Diane Keaton’s Heaven, a decent if imperfect presentation of the film. The distributor’s website claims a fresh 4K scan “from the original film materials,” but I’m betting those materials were an interpositive or 35mm print, rather than the negative. Flecks and scratches pop up here and there, and one shot towards the end of the film has a strange jump-zoom artifact that looks like two takes were clumsily spliced together to solve a problem. Randy and the Mob is clearly a labor of love, with every penny up there on the screen, and that does make its rougher edges easier to take – but they’re still there, and sometimes they’re really rough.

In addition to The Accountant and the Randy theatrical trailer, the disc includes a half-hour production featurette, “The Making of Randy and the Mob,” featuring B-roll and EPK interviews with McKinnon, Blount and Goggins, along with additional footage of a goateed McKinnon sitting in a mocked-up studio to stitch it all together. It has a similarly ramshackle charm, spending at least a third of its running time on the film’s one big stunt – McKinnon tumbling through a garbage dump – and ending with an exhortation to buy or rent the DVD.

This was the last feature McKinnon would direct for Ginny Mule Pictures; the shingle closed down after Blount’s death in 2010. McKinnon went on to create the Peabody-winning television series Rectify, and of course Goggins became a major star. Randy was their last project together, and whatever else it is, it’s the product of three friends having a great time. It’s got a warmth to it.

Mercy is now available in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from Alliance Home Entertainment. (Canadians, that’s a different Alliance.) Randy and the Mob is now available on Blu-ray from Lightyear Entertainment.

Up next: Criterion upgrades Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise to 4K, and Imprint adds a pair of underappreciated '80s titles to its collection. Stay tuned!