Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi Director: Bong Joon Ho Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Anamaria Vartolomei, Daniel Henshall, Cameron Britton, Patsy Ferran, Michael Monroe, Tim Key, Lloyd Hutchinson, Stephen Park, Angus Imrie, Ian Hanmore, Ellen Robertson and Haydn Gwynne Distributor: Warner Bros.
Grade: D
For those who’d like to see Robert Pattinson killed on screen—Edward Cullen haters, you know who you are—Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Parasite” will be a joy: he dies over and over in very unpleasant ways. And suffers woefully in the process. The movie dies too, with agonizing slowness. Ponderous and pretentious, “Mickey 17” is a dull, insufferably smug sci-fi parable about class division, colonialism, political cultism, cloning, speciocide and religious mania, all in one package. It’s also supposed to be funny.
Based on the 2022 novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton but adding to the number of iterations in the existence of Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, the plot is set in a dystopian future when great masses are attempting to flee earth for other planets. Among them are two hapless guys, sad-sack, dim-bulb Mickey and his smarter but shifty pal Timo (Steven Yeun), who are in debt to Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore), a murderous loan shark. Both manage to get spots on a spacecraft headed for Niflheim, where failed politician and quasi-religious cult leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his shrewish, manipulative wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) intend to establish a colony befitting their ideas of purity and self-glorification—and the dominance of a privileged elite over the hoodwinked masses. Timo lies about his expertise to secure a cushy job as a pilot, but Mickey is not so lucky. Signing the application without bothering to read it, he volunteers to be an Expendable, not understanding what that entails. He’s gleefully accepted.
That’s because the Expendable is the guy who must accept every dangerous assignment, from being tested with potentially fatal concoctions formulated by the science team headed by Dr. Arkady (Cameron Britton) to undertaking every probably lethal task. If he dies, it’s fine, because he can be “reprinted” by a machine from waste matter, the duplicate then implanted with his electronically stored bank of memories. (The procedure is forbidden on earth, but Marshall had secured dispensation for him to use it in space.) By the time the plot kicks in four years after liftoff, Mickey’s in his seventeenth version, which seems about to end since he’s fallen into a deep crevice on icebound Niflheim and Timo, passing by, notes that it would be a waste of his time to attempt a rescue.
But he survives unexpectedly when a band of slug-like critters the humans call Creepers drag him off and, rather than devouring him, spit him out on the tundra. Annoyed by being dismissed as unfit to consume, he makes his way back to the compound, where for some reason the beautiful—and formidable—Nasha (Naomi Ackie) has chosen the schmo as her preferred squeeze. But to his distress he finds that since he was presumed deceased, a Mickey 18 has been created to replace him. And presumably because an inept lab assistant had stumblingly unplugged the regenerator in mid-process, Mickey 18 emerged with a more aggressive, indeed rebellious personality.
What follows is a turgid farrago in which the two Mickeys vie both for survival—since “multiples,” as they’re called, are viewed as an abomination subject to immediate (and permanent) execution, which explains why Mickey 18 wants to off his inconvenient predecessor—and for Nasha. There’s a further complication in Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), the death of whose girlfriend (Ellen Robertson) Mickey 17 had inadvertently caused. She’s now looking for either revenge or a new source of sexual satisfaction.
All of this is lumped into the larger plot of Marshall’s megalomaniacal ambitions, which, under the influence of Ylfa and his religious advisor Preston (Daniel Henshall)—who must not be confused with his spokesman (Tim Key), the fellow dressed for some reason in a pigeon costume—come to center on the genocidal extermination of the Creepers, a species that turns out to be far from the unintelligent bugs they’re assumed to be, and incredibly numerous. The big finale combines crazy Ken’s campaign against them with the imminent execution of the two Mickeys, as well as a baby Creeper and their defender Nasha.
The cast commits to all Bong’s preachy nonsense with a zeal it hardly merits. Pattinson comes off best; he differentiates ably between Mickey 17, who’s like a wimpy silent screen comic except for the fact that he emits a whiny, strangulated voice, and Mickey 18, who’s sneeringly pugnacious. But it’s hardly a dual role that calls for any subtlety, and he provides none. Neither does Yeun, who’s as blatantly sleazy here as he was sympathetic in “Minari.” Ackie more than adequately embodies Nasha’s forceful self-confidence, the very opposite of Mickey 17’s mousiness.
The nadir of the acting certainly comes in the performances of Swinton and Ruffalo. She mugs as ferociously as she’s ever done—which is saying quite a lot. But he outdoes himself. Wearing false front teeth that push his upper lip out in a fashion that makes you fear he might bite his tongue off shouting Marshall’s maniacal lines, he’s bad enough in the first two acts, when he sports a fluffy hairdo. But when in the third he slicks back the locks and, jutting out his chin, looks like a grotesque version of Marlon Brando, he goes beyond bad to unmentionable. It’s a turn worthy of Razzie consideration.
“Mickey 17” is a fairly expensive film, but apart from the Creeper effects from the VFX team supervised by Dan Glass, it doesn’t look particularly impressive. One can admire an early shot of desperate applicants for a shot at space travel trooping along the spiral walkway of an airport, but nothing that follows equals it, and overall Fiona Crombie’s production design and Catherine George’s costumes are just okay. Darius Khondji’s cinematography is oppressively murky and claustrophobic, while Yang Jinmo’s editing feels sluggish; together they make rather a hash of the big finale, and a nightmarish insert at the close is one of Bong’s most misguided contrivances. Jung Jaeil’s score often goes silent, which is fine since when it opens up, it proves unmemorable.
Admirers of Bong’s earlier films will probably expend a great deal of effort trying to find something nice to say about “Mickey 17,” but as with “Okja,” which was a similarly bloated mélange of half-baked ideas told on a grand scale, that will be a tough sell. Fortunately, his other half-dozen films offer plenty of proof of what his eccentric talent can achieve.
As for Warner Bros., this costly fiasco could very well be the 2025 equivalent of “Joker: Folie à Deux.”