MICKEY 17 REVIEW

“The screenplay alone should have set off warning bells that this movie was going to lose a ton of money.”

It’s been five years since Bong Joon-ho won three Oscars for his comedic thriller, Parasite, and multiple delays, including a pandemic and a strike, has kept his follow-up, Mickey 17, from arriving in American theaters sooner. The relatively high-concept sci-fi comedy is based on a book by Edward Ashton, making it the South Korean filmmaker’s first adaptation since Snowpiercer in 2013, as well as his third English language feature.

Robert Pattinson plays the titular character, Mickey Barnes, who has escaped to the icy planet of Niflheim on the lam from a mobster, along with his pal Timo (Steven Yeun). Mickey has unwittingly signed up to be an “expendable,” a worker put into dangerous situations with science that can “reprint” him and reinsert all his memories when he inevitably dies. We meet Mickey 17 as he’s trapped at the bottom of a cave about to be eaten by a giant space creature. Much of Mickey’s problems can be traced back to the right-wing conservative politician, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who have created rules that make life more difficult for Mickey. Mickey has also fallen in love with a fellow worker named Nasha (Naomi Ackie), but things get complicated when Mickey ends up as a “multiple” and Nasha seems more interested in the newer and more gregarious Mickey 18.

I’d seen the trailer enough times to know that this was probably going to be a strange sci-fi concept ala some of Luc Besson’s forays into the genre, but I also expected the movie to be far funnier than it actually ended up being. Pattinson’s Mickey narrates much of the film, using an odd voice and accent, something that quickly gets tiring, because voice over is lazy filmmaking 101, but it’s also not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, as we watch Mickey being put into one awkward or dangerous situation after another. It’s something that never really takes off, so you’re basically just watching Pattinson sleepwalk his way through the movie with a really terrible performance. The actors surrounding him aren’t much better, with Ruffalo chewing up every scene with what is clearly his Trump impression.

Two things I will commend about the film are the production design, and the creature design and visual FX used to create the abundance of “creepers,” the smaller “babies” as adorable as the larger “mother” is intimidating. Director Bong has proven his ability with VFX going all the way back to The Host, and that sometimes makes up for the weak and over-the-top human performances, but just barely. The score by Jung Jae-il, who received an Emmy nominations for “Squid Game” (but oddly, no Oscar nomination for Parasite) is another aspect of the movie that generally works but not enough to save it.

The movie is also way too long, and could have easily lost a good 20 minutes in the middle when the two Mickeys and Nasha are interacting on the spaceship with another female worker named Kai, a character who serves very little purpose and is quietly discarded in the last act battle between Marshall and the creepers that have amassed around the ship.

Who knows if the problems with this film can be blamed on its source material or if there was something lost in translation, but Mickey 17 is a disaster of a film that makes you wonder how this got greenlit with such an insane budget at all. The screenplay alone should have set off warning bells that this movie was going to lose a ton of money.

Rating: 5/10

Mickey 17 opens nationwide on Friday, March 7.