Synopsis:
After committing an impulsive, vicious crime while searching for his missing daughter, a frantic father (Luke Bracey) goes on the run from law enforcement and soon begins receiving chilling calls from an unknown entity claiming to know her whereabouts. As he faithfully follows the caller’s increasingly unhinged instructions, he is driven perilously close to the edge of sanity while discovering exactly how far he is willing to go to save his child.
What We Thought:
Mercy Road reminded me of the Tom Hardy flick Locke. The majority of the film takes place in the lead actor’s car with multiple phone calls and him trying to accomplish something. Luke Bracey is this film’s Tom Hardy.
Bracey plays the father of a girl and he does something violent to her stepfather (who deserved it). He gets in his car and drives away. The girl is missing and the authorities think Bracey has her. Her mother/his ex-wife thinks he has her and doesn’t know why he did what he did to the stepfather. As the truth starts to unroll, people start believing him, but there’s also another voice calling, that of Toby Jones. Jones is a man who gets things done, but not on the side of the law. Bracey must try to find his daughter while doing tasks for Jones all the while trying to outrace the authorities.
The film is good for a watch, but there are things in it that didn’t work for me. There’s a spider that comes and goes and what I took as hallucinations. That wasn’t necessary to me. The ending really didn’t work for me as well, but I can’t explain why without ruining it. Bracey is fine and I’ve seen him in other projects, but even with its short runtime the film grew a bit tiresome. Single location films either hold your attention or play out too slowly and this one is a bit too slow for me.
If you haven’t seen Locke then Mercy Road might be a better watch for you. It’s not uninteresting, but it could have been better. I didn’t mind watching it, but it feels too drawn out for what is happening. Plus the ending disappointed me a lot. The look of it didn’t work for me either. Despite 99% of it being one man in a car taking phone calls, it looked excessively fake with bad backdrops. Fans of Bracey will enjoy it, but I can’t see myself watching it again anytime soon.
The Nerds Templar 