Mickey 17 (2025)
Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite won best picture less than a month before the world shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. When a filmmaker scores big at the Oscars, studios are usually willing to give them a lot of leeway on their next project. Sadly, Bong's follow-up Mickey 17 is a disappointment.
Robert Pattinson plays Mickey, a
hapless, would-be entrepreneur in 2054 who's massively in debt for a failed
macaron restaurant. The loan shark coming for him loves to record himself
murdering his debtors in gruesome ways, so Mickey and his partner Timo (Steven
Yeun) sign up for a colonizing mission to an ice planet as a means of escape.
The mission is led by a former congressman (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Toni
Collette).
Timo has piloting skills so he is able
to get a decent job, but Mickey has no marketable skills so he signs up to be
an "expendable." Basically, he dies over and over again so the interplanetary
settlers can learn about the local environment, and a new Mickey is made from a
cloning machine each time.
There is some amusing dark comedy as
Mickey sustains death after death in the first act. But after his 17th
incarnation is left for dead in a cave occupied by a family of slug-like
aliens, an 18th Mickey is printed. However, the slugs don't eat Mickey 17. The
Mickeys meet and the aggressive Mickey 18 is immediately trying to kill the
more passive Mickey 17. Meanwhile, the former congressman wants to kill the
otherwise peaceful slugs.
At 137 minutes, the pacing is kinda
slow, especially after the promising first act. A big problem in the film is
Ruffalo, the film's villain, is clearly channeling Donald Trump. The result is
a very over-the-top, buffoonish performance. Collette matches Ruffalo in
scenery chewing as his wife. As a result, the film's tone is all over the
place. The villains need to be scary. Here, they just come off as clownish. No,
there's nothing wrong with satirizing and mocking Trump or the cult-like
devotion of some of his followers, but the satire here is more ham-fisted than
clever. The buffoonery clashes with the scenes of ugly violence.
The box office can be hard to predict,
but Warner Bros. will likely regret spending $120 million on this one. It's
quirky and distinctive enough to attract a cult following, but in the '80s or '90s
this would've been budgeted and marketed as a potential cult film—not as a
major box office player.
