If you have to make a movie where voiceover runs constantly over the first half to help the audience follow, even though the action is really not that hard to follow, then maybe you shouldn’t be making that movie. If that voiceover is performed by Robert Pattison, doing a voice that sounds like a cartoon version of a gangster’s simpleton henchman who can’t decide whether he’s from New York City or the American South, then maybe you really shouldn’t be making that movie. In fact, the only relief we get from that voiceover is when a second Robert Pattinson shows up, and you have to assume they thought it was a bad idea to have multiple Robert Pattinsons on screen and then one also narrating. If they caught that one bad idea, then they left in plenty of others.
Mickey 17 feels like the logical next movie for the guy who made Okja, not for the guy who made Parasite. The difference is, Okja was actually good. Bong Joon-ho has always had a thing for the absurd, even within the otherwise realistic milieu of Parasite, it’s just that in the past he’s put it to good use, almost without exception. The first major asterisk in that approach comes in the form of this adaptation of a novel by Edward Ashton, which overdoses on the indulgences of Bong’s more eccentric whims. We usually tolerate these in the interest of the great filmmaking that surrounds them. Here, they are intolerable.
The Mickey we follow is indeed the 17th Mickey, and he knows this because his memories are implanted in a newly printed body each time he dies. See, Mickey is an expendable, a human guinea pig who signs on the dotted line to be exposed to known dangers to see how quickly and painfully they kill him. He does this because it might lead to the discovery of a vaccine, or something equally beneficial to society. And since he wakes up again the next day, an excruciating death every 24 hours, or however often they need him to do it, is a small price to pay for steady employment.
The question is whether this is a society worth benefitting. Mickey is a passenger on a ship flying to the distant planet Nilfheim, where a new colony will be established under the insufferable leadership of a blowhard former politician, religious man and all-around rich guy, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). He’s got Trumpish enough mannerisms and hair to make the comparison inescapable. (Plus, what about those false teeth.) On his arm is a wife of equal temperament, Yifa (Toni Colette). They purport to lead the flock of other travellers, but are really hoping to exterminate any threat when they reach the planet – most notably a species of centipede-like creatures they call Creepers – and test each of threat on Mickey first.
The constant death is sustainable for Mickey with the love of another shipmate, Nasha (Naomi Ackie). They are physically romantic at a time when sex may be forbidden for – um, not sure what reason, they just kind of drop that plot thread – but also each other’s soulmates. A threat to that bliss, and Mickey 17’s very existence, arrives in the former of Mickey 18, who was reprinted after 17 unexpectedly survived a night on the planet where he was presumed dead.
We may have been wise to suspect something was amiss with Mickey 17 when it got moved from its 2024 release date. We couldn’t have known just how amiss. It’s hard to overstate how regularly Bong whiffs with this material; you have to see it to believe it. Supposed humour falls flat. Supposed profundity is teased but not explored, or over-explored through on-the-nose dialogue (or voiceover). Characters are poorly introduced and then never fleshed out, or disappear for long stretches until we’ve forgotten about them. (Hello, character played by Steven Yeun). The narrative veritably flops around. And every time the movie, for a moment, seems like it might be building toward something, it gets distracted again on nothing.
One thing that’s clear from Mickey 17, though, is that there’s a tight movie in here somewhere, screaming to get out. Maybe that tight movie is the film’s enticing trailer, which filled many of us with hope. This is actually quite a good idea for a film, even if it’s a little too impressed with the idea of clones, brought to us on screen too many times before to seem novel. There is a sleek 90 minutes of this idea that just needed to rely a bit more on regular Hollywood filmmaking mechanics and less on an unwieldy script that can’t distinguish an aside from a tangent.
You can’t talk about “Hollywood filmmaking mechanics” without implicitly endorsing their opposite. In this case, though, Bong could have benefitted from tightening his story while also trusting his prodigious visual skills, to prevent the need for the laborious voiceover. We sometimes need the cleanliness of a stripped-down approach, and Bong can do it. He entertained his flights of fancy in Snowpiercer while keeping that movie moving relentlessly forward – both in the form of a train that can never stop, and the form of the people steadily moving toward the front of it.
There is no such momentum in Mickey 17. Wobbly stakes are established only very belatedly, both in the form of the danger to the snowy planet’s native life, and in the existential threat to Mickey embodied by his doppelganger. But once Bong establishes the rules for the relationship between those two characters – now that they are separate, one of them can actually die and never have his mind revived because there is a different Mickey to reprint – he immediately stops focusing on the immediacy of that threat and shifts the action to a meaningless dinner with the Marshalls and other characters, which feels like it goes on forever.
Pattinson is certainly part of the problem. When he plays a character with a capital C, there are ways to do it where he underplays the material, like he did as Batman. Pattinson does not have that problem here. There’s the choice he makes with his voice, which is meant to ingratiate us to him but just makes us think of him as intellectually challenged. But his reaction shots are also big. Actors always likes tasty parts where they get to portray two distinct characters, though neither of Pattinson’s personas works. Nor does it make sense, within what we know of this copying system, that a completely different Mickey personality would form, without explanation, only two hours after being born. If anything, we should just have two different intellectually challenged cartoon gangster henchmen.
You can nitpick at Mickey 17, or you can tackle its monstrous story, pacing and acting problems. You don’t have to limit yourself either to being petty or piercing this movie deeply; you can do both. Bong Joon-ho is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, and we have been starved for his next movie after the best picture-winning Parasite. That it’s this is a huge disappointment, but directors like Bong get a pass when they make a stinker, because it almost never happens. Just maybe now it’s time for another realistic movie about Koreans scamming other Koreans.
Mickey 17 is now playing in cinemas.