It all seems doomed from the start-and never in the same throat-gripping class with such fateful horrors-at-sea epics as Adrift or Robert Redford's All is Lost.

The film has been made with plenty of sincerity and no small amount of effort, but with no idea of what it wants to say.

An engrossing character study of an ordinary man whose extraordinary ambition proves his undoing.

The Mercy cannot keep itself afloat and never quite manages to raise its sails up, portraying a very predictable (to the point of boring) voyage, with an almost unconvincing and foolish “hero”-character at its centre.