Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Set in the near future with razor thin connections to today’s alarming headlines, “Mercy,” a new sci-fi political thriller starring Kali Reis, Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe, plays Detective Jaqueline “Jaq” Diallo alongside her under fire partner Detective Chris Raven, played by Chris Pratt.
Raven is accused of murdering his wife and in a lightning fast justice system he himself helped develop called Mercy, is strapped to a chair before a looming AI judge and has only 90 minutes to prove his innocence using footage from cop body cams, door cams, social media apps and database history.
As today’s headlines show, that type of image discovery can instantly change the guilt or innocence of a crime scene.
Reis’s Diallo jumps on her futuristic Quad Copter to help track down suspects and clues as her character goes from doubting her partner’s innocence, to save the day, to coming under fire herself in a riveting finale.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the big budget film is from Amazon MGM. During the press interviews, Reis sat patiently in a luxury makeshift studio at a Beverly Hills Hotel, decked out in braids, tattoos, piercings and upscale denim, happy to “hang with the big boys”.
A former boxer, a world champion in two weight classes, Reis held the WBC female middleweight title in 2016 and the WBA, WBO, and IBO female light welterweight titles between 2020 and 2022.
In 2021, Reis made their acting debut as the star of the American thriller film Catch the Fair One, which was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. Reis has since starred in the acclaimed spooky mystery series True Detective: Night Country (2024) with Jodie Foster and had nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Critics Choice Award.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Reis has Cape Verdean heritage and is a member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe. Reis incorporated the name Mequinonoag, given by their mother, which translates as “many feathers” or “many talents”, into their boxing nickname, “K.O. Mequinonoag.”
So what drew her to the role in ‘“Mercy’?
“First and foremost it was the script that attracted me,” Reis told ICT in the interview. “And what it was based on from the opening page. I thought okay, what is this? What is going on here? We get dropped right in the middle of this entire thing without any back story. But my specific character, you don’t know what angle she’s coming from at first. She’s a partner, this whole scenario is happening, but there’s so many layers. She’s faced with so many different decisions to make and you really don’t know where she’s making these decisions from.”
Diallo is investigating her partner Raven’s home and murder crime scene, it all looks bad for him as door cam footage shows him banging on the door and arguing with his wife before storming out minutes later to get drunk at a bar.
“Yeah first you think, oh, that’s his partner,” Reis says. “But she tells him straight out, listen, I have to do my job. So it was very attractive, as a role, especially getting a long way to the end and realizing now I see why she had to make these decisions. It was very attractive to actually work off of the baseline that they had for her too, and I love creating back stories. They gave me such a great character to work with in my own back story, especially being Chris’s partner, but not sharing the same space physically, we had to communicate just like in the movie, for real, just over screens and over audio. I had to really build my back story of this very layered character.”
Since Raven is in the Mercy court chair with the clock ticking down in the screen’s corner, Diallo had to be the one doing the outside detective work for him.
“Me and Chris discussed our back story, so we understood where we were communicating and what my character was willing to do to help Chris try to solve this entire 90 minute fiasco.”
How difficult was it for her to act with someone she is not physically in a scene with until the very end?
Reis says “It wasn’t difficult because it was relevant to what we were actually really doing in reality in the film, we were only communicating via FaceTime and through the phones and audio. So building our rapport and him explaining his back story and how we, us, discussing and brainstorming, how do you think they became partners? What do you think their relationship is? How long have they been partners? What does she think about this? Building that made it really easy for us to have a conversation we would normally have, either in person or on the phone. Building that bond outside of that made us communicating on the screens and just through the phone, just like the film, really easy actually.”
Reis has the coolest vehicle — as she zips around Los Angeles on a Quad Copter — a real LAPD motorcycle that they made into the quad copter with four helicopter blades.
“It was a real thing,” Reis says “on a lift with everything so I was really on that thing. It’s really cool. I am still trying to get it home,” she added with a laugh.
“But no, that was really fun and it gave me the sense, especially being in the stage where we shot it, there’s a 360 screen from the ceiling, with walls of downtown LA and me flying through these different places and the technology that we use to film made it seem real. It seemed like I was on a ride. I felt right at home sitting on that thing. I spent a lot of time on that. Yeah, it was really cool, I selfishly was like, can we do another take?”
Swift justice
With so many contemporary parallels, with the way that information from body cams and door cams and TikTok and Instagram get seen so fast, everyone feels that justice should be speeded up, but then the film shows that mistakes can be made and it’s hard to be thorough as Raven’s guilt level goes up and down with each new byte of info. What are Reis’s feelings on that?
“I believe this is such a common, moving question” Reis says “but such a good question because you ask yourself, would you want to be in front of an AI judge? I think the fact that when it comes to different people not having the resources, the funds to represent themselves, they have all the information in Mercy court, you’re provided with every single tool that the AI judge can find to prove yourself innocent. In our real world, if there was a system that was based to give everybody the tools to help themselves, if they were ever in that predicament, I feel that could be helpful. Also, there are some human biases that I think we need to hold on to, but I’ve seen in real time, can hinder a decision by an actual judge.”
“Say a judge comes across somebody and they just had a bad day. They really don’t want to be there. They get reminded of a case they had maybe five years ago, so they have this bias, or something like that. I feel as though it can be very helpful and the speed as well, because things get prolonged, judges get sick, lawyers drop out, things happen. For the victims in these different circumstances where justice needs to be served, something like that could definitely be helpful. Do I think it should just be AI? No, it should also be humans. A happy balance would be ideal. But remember AI, all these machines are man-made, so there are mistakes that are being made as well.”
We live in a visual culture, Reis says it gets a little scary to not have your own thoughts when things look so real that aren’t.
Bringing representation
Being mixed race African and Native American, Reis says she feels just her presence, her overall look, is powerful.
“That’s always been my hope getting into this industry is that having representation, whether it’s an indigenous story or not, I’m still a mixed Indigenous human being that is in this industry. And I’m doing the best I can to swing these doors open and leave them open for the next generation of other people who want to get into storytelling. It’s in my blood storytelling.”
“So as far as Diallo’s backstory, she did have some heritage, but that wasn’t something that I wanted to nail in on. It wasn’t part of the story, but as far as my backstory for the reasons why she made decisions, I love creating backstories, especially with such a complex character like this, you have to make sure that these are the decisions she would make. These are the decisions that Jaq Diallo would make. So I am always very aware of what I look like, especially if I’m able to have tattoos like that showing.”
While Reis’s cheek piercings are removed, she has very visible floral neck tattoos showing throughout the film.
“Yeah, I did,” she smiles. “That’s how I get noticed. That’s representative of a lot of things I am. So I am always, no matter what, an indigenous character on purpose even if it’s just a character in a movie that I play, I’m always me as a person. We know that going in. I’m very, very aware of how much and who and what I represent. I’m very proud to do that. Even if I’m the only one on set, that’s a testament of time, especially being in such a mega very relevant film like ‘Mercy’, and right now I’m very proud to say that I can hang with the big boys in a big screen film.”
“Mercy” premiered January 23rd nationwide.