Honestly, I tried. Let no one say I watched sci-fi caper Mickey 17 hoping for anything but the best. This may have been the problem. The last film made by director Bong Joon-ho was Parasite, the crackerjack comedy of South Korean class war that won Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars. Maybe I could just review that again?
It would be unfair to expect Bong to make another Parasite. He hasn’t. Neither is his new movie a disaster. It might be something worse. It is passable.
The story is mostly set in space, and stars Robert Pattinson with an American accent. He is Mickey: a sad-sack in a flashback. The film opens in the cosmos, then goes into reverse, spending a long time explaining itself through voiceover.
In a grim day after tomorrow, the hapless Mickey has taken a gig on a flight to a distant planet slated for human colonisation. With few actual skills, he joins as an “expendable” — a flunky whose duties will probably kill him. Don’t panic. A replica will be generated through controversial tech: a 3D printer for people.
By the time we get back where we started, the colonists have a beachhead in their hostile new home, and our hero is, yes, the 17th Mickey. Another lengthy sidebar will soon detail the dire consequences should two copies of an expendable ever somehow coexist. Guess the rest and you’d be right.
And yet much of the movie stays fresh in this vacuum-packed environment. Pattinson works well in the skewed comic register in which the film is most fun. His constant look of dazed surprise makes a rolling punchline to the Groundhog Day monotony of his lives and deaths. And the people-printer makes a neat prop, spitting out Mickeys that flop on to the floor when a lab assistant goes Awol.
Even so, Mickey manages to snag a love interest in tough-nut security agent Nasha. She is played by Naomi Ackie, who, like Steven Yeun as the shady Timo, is a gifted actor given plenty of screen time but not much to do. They are the Mickeys of the movie, stuck with the grunt work of keeping us interested while Bong tries to locate a plot.
In its absence, there is stuff. For one, giant space grubs that cause mayhem. While Parasite played like a deranged riff on domestic farce, Bong is also a fan of pulp, where lurid surfaces meet weighty subtexts. But what you would take for big ideas — the psychic war of rival Mickeys, what is and isn’t human — end up muffled and minimised.
The Bong movie Mickey 17 actually recalls is Snowpiercer, the 2013 post-apocalyptic train ride later remade as a streaming series. Now the politics of that story are bluntly updated. If the space adventurism hints at Elon Musk, the on-screen villain is a preening politician with an imperial bent, played panto-broad by Mark Ruffalo. Given the possible fate of Greenland, that much might seem prophetic, but God the performance is unfunny.
All told, the tone is anarchic in the most frustrating sense. The problem is counterintuitive for a film that has clearly been meticulously pre-planned. But it also feels under-directed, as if the actors had been left to guess the nature of the film they were shooting. The result is clunky and disposable, though worse movies come out every week. It will really only rankle when you remember its director has the talent to make masterpieces.
★★☆☆☆
In UK and US cinemas from March 7