Would A Stroke Be Less Painful?

The French poster of Found Guilty announces a Chris Pratt well equipped, flying motorcycles and the impassive face of Rebecca Ferguson. A program almost respected, except that the film will present to us the actor of Guardians of the Galaxy tied to a chair for 90 minutes out of the hundred that the film lasts. This may surprise more than one spectator.

The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy is available

If you don’t know director Timur Bekmambetovknow that he has films like the remake of Ben-Hur, Night Watch, Wanted : Choisis ton destin or even Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. We don’t say that we knew what we were committing to when we signed up to watch Found Guiltybut there were clues.

The fact that the film is produced by Amazon was another. We remember War of the Worlds from Prime Video where Ice Cube, in front of a screen, saved humanity thanks to the purchase of a USB key on Jeff Bezos’ purchasing platform. Are you ready for Chris Pratt, in front of a screen, exonerating himself thanks to cameras designed by… we’ll let you guess.

In a not-so-distant future, faced with out-of-control crime, a system “Mercy » is put in place. An AI gains the power to judge suspects in just 90 minutes thanks to unlimited access to a surveillance network that would make George Orwell blush. Detective Chris Raven (Pratt) has been one of Mercy’s biggest advocates. Today, it is he who finds himself in the defendant’s chair following the murder of his wife (Annabelle Wallis). Facing Judge IA Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), he has little time to prove his innocence by lowering his guilt rate to 92.5%.

Critical Found Guilty: Would a stroke be less painful? — © Sony Pictures

The victory of the worlds

Before hitting the hard ground, we put on the gloves. Found Guilty is not a new War of the Worlds Amazonesque, notably because Bekmambetov, producer of the latter (the cluster of clues is increasingly broad), is not Rich Lee and does not have his budget. Let’s understand that the filmmaker masters the “behind a screen” aspect well, which he had already experienced, and knows how to make his film dynamic and clear.

The feature film never loses us, remains perfectly readable and regularly renews its imagery so as not to bore. Telephone, messaging, social networks, video surveillance cameras, on-board cameras, 3D reconstruction… Bekmambetov uses all the means, ultimately very contemporary, to make us experience the action while his hero remains motionless. It’s almost a shame that the film doesn’t embrace its “real time” concept all the way to the end.. As for Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, they seem less lost than Ice Cube and Eva Longoria. The famous little Palmashow victories.

98.7% guilty

Less lost does not necessarily mean competent. We have nothing against Chris Prattbut we know little about his dramatic talents and Found Guilty he women two expressions: pity and annoyance. He will abuse both. Concerning Rebecca Ferguson, whom we love with love, her impassive face is what we expected of her in the role of an AI. However, her icy face contracts so many times that we could even see her sweating over the contradictions brought by Raven. Even though this AI is supposed to be closer to a human, its expressiveness is regularly antithetical to its artificial nature. A problem that a simple voice signature would have erased, but we are not going to remake the film.

Anyway, it’s not like the screenplay by Marco van Bellewhich is only the second script in ten years, had only one gap. We can say that he leaks everywhere, starting with its rebound. It’s obvious that Raven is innocent, so from there the plot hinges on finding the real culprit. The concern inherent in this concept of film through a screen is the limitation of secondary characters and the forced usefulness of all to the story. No need to have an investigator’s degree to foil the twist after a few phone calls.

Not to be put in front of everyone’s eyes…

One thing particularly bothered us in this bad plagiarism – sorry, bad inspiration – of Minority Report : its relationship to the famous technology. Beyond advertising for homemade products, we feel that the film intends to go easy on everyone and not offend anyone. Although the story reveals several times the flaws of a system where our freedom would be subject to an AI, suggesting that it intends to denounce our growing dependence on it, it also caresses it in the sense of the chip.

Found Guilty advocates a kind of reconciliation where AI and humans can learn from each otherhelp each other and, ultimately, find solutions together. Did the Mercy system fail by charging an innocent person? Yes. But the plot does not condemn him and even assumes a second chance. Man can be as much a solution as a problem depending on his intentions. Do we need the complementarity of the two minds? Yes, but suddenly, this means that a Mercy 2.0 system can see the light of day.

The biggest problem of Found Guilty is therefore not wanting to position oneself and, in turn, perhaps offering some insidious ideas to the wrong people in our very real society. Far from playing the card of warning against the surveillance state, the film takes the side of being resolved thanks to this same surveillance state. Since the goal is to exonerate someone, it is legitimate to access everything that falls within the private domain, without control. Holy bread for an authoritarian and arbitrary drift.

Subscribe to WorldOfSoftware

Although he is a little more polite than many of his peers, Found Guilty has difficulty hiding its nature as a future platform filmsuffering from a lack of ambition and overall quality. It’s not a cinematic disaster, but its pointlessness makes it forgettable after 90 minutes and its latent ideology can even make it a dangerous film…

The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy is available