‘Mickey 17’ is a freewheeling sci-fi satire

After winning four Academy Awards for “Parasite” in 2020, including the first Best Picture statuette awarded to a non-English-language film, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho had a blank check in his pocket. Statistically, he will never be better situated to do whatever he wants. So, what has he chosen to do with that cultural cache? With his latest and most mainstream release, “Mickey 17,” he has blown over $100 million of Warner Brothers Discovery’s money on a quirky, meandering and unsellable sci-fi comedy with little chance of recouping its budget. And that’s pretty rad!

WBD studio head David Zaslav, in his tenure, has single-handedly devastated Warner’s history and legacy as an artist-friendly outfit, driving Christopher Nolan to the loving arms of Universal and shelving fan-favorite projects like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme” for tax write-offs. You can then see why they would make the perfect target for an auteur looking for maximum creative freedom and minimal interest in fiduciary responsibility. What Joon Ho has helped execute here is one of the most amusing heists in recent memory. Whether or not his latest film’s charms will woo you depends entirely on how compelling you find Robert Pattinson doing pratfalls in space.

Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a broke and not-too-bright loser living in a near future where late-stage capitalism has begun driving humans to the stars from a pillaged Earth further on its way to being inhabitable. On the run from an esoteric loan shark who enjoys filming the torture of his clientele more than he does being repaid, Mickey jumps the line onto a colony ship by signing up for the Expendable program. He skips the fine print that says they’re going to experiment on him and turn him into a clonable grunt whose sole existence is to straddle the line between human-size guinea pig and bottom-rung gofer. 

Every time Mickey goes on a suicide mission, future technology simply reprints his body and redownloads his memories and personality into new meat recycled from trash and feces. Each new Mickey receives a new number. His life in space is a thankless one, but he has love, at least, with security agent Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), the epitome of the kind of woman who will fight for her mousy beau when they put pickles on his plain hamburger. (Theoretically, anyway. They live on a spaceship where everyone eats calorically rationed slop and paste.)

One day, Mickey, on his 17th iteration, survives being eaten by a “creeper,” the indigent life form on the ice planet Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo doing something akin to a Trump impression) is trying to colonize. The creepers save his life, only for him to make it back onto a ship to find Mickey 18 (also Pattinson) canoodling with Nasha. Multiples are illegal, so if the two are seen together, they both will be executed. There’s more at play with Marshall and his insane wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) and their mini-media presence on their tortuous journey to form a “pure” new civilization built on the backs of a diverse, poor workforce. 

But the picture’s heart is genuinely The Robert Pattinson Show. No other actor in Hollywood could have brought this much life, verve, and entertainment value to the twin portraits of dueling Mickies. 17, a nebbish who passively accepts all of life’s abuse because, deep down, he’s been conditioned to believe he deserves it. And 18, a more actualized self who, having seen from the outside how servile he has been his entire life, grows a backbone and becomes radicalized by his predicament rather than victim to it. Between the two performances, Pattinson has name-checked ’90s cartoon “Ren & Stimpy,” “Jackass” stars Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O, and most importantly, Jim Carrey in “Liar Liar,” as inspirations. It is, without a doubt, one of the most selfless and dynamic screen performances in recent memory. 

Pattinson’s elastic facial expressions and rubber-band body physics provide a Looney Tunes kind of energy to every moment but are tempered by a subtly tragic interiority. Within his turn lives perhaps the finest portrayal of the modern worker’s plight, which drives the larger picture in a believable and affecting way. But “Mickey 17” is also two and a half hours long. And as much fun as it is to watch Bong Joon Ho careen to and fro in a luxury car on an icy road, the longer the run time lasts, the less you’re enticed by the possibility he crashes it into a fiery crescendo and the more it begins to feel like dicking around for dicking around’s sake.

Ruffalo’s nowhere near as lively as he was the other year in “Poor Things” playing a similar scoundrel-type role, and he seems to be walking in Pedro Pascal’s “Wonder Woman 1984” steps. Such is the difficulty in sending up a figure like Trump, who is already the world’s most grotesque and perfect cartoon. Any real parody or impression will only pale. But Joon-ho’s vision, aided by cinematographer Darius Khondji’s sickly yellow- and green-tinted visuals, captures more of our present-day predicament’s essence in the images than showing Marshall’s supporters wearing red hats. 

Early in the film, there’s a harrowing composition as Mickey looks up at the long line to get onto a colony ship. It lopes around in off-kilter circles higher and higher above his vantage point while sandstorms outside threaten to overtake the entire structure. Individuals move forward a step, and the whole snake-like procession lurches so imperceptibly that they may as well all be standing still.

As fun as “Mickey 17” is, it’s in these fleeting moments of ecological despair that it rings the truest and in its brief bursts of justifiable rage at the state of the world around us. It may have been unintentional, but in letting his freak flag fly and doing whatever he wanted with this picture, Joon Ho has made a film whose structural weaknesses feel like purposeful recreations of the absurdity we all experience whenever we try to make sense of the news these days. 

Perhaps that’s why when Mickey 18 snaps at 17 telling him about how poorly a dinner with Marshall has gone, the camera is positioned so that his ranting about taking some action isn’t aimed at his fellow clone-in-arms but at the viewer themselves. Whether this film is seen in droves enough for audience members to walk out wanting to do what 18 ultimately does, well … that remains to be seen.

“Mickey 17” is currently playing exclusively in theaters, and a streaming release on Max is expected soon.