Michael Cera did it in Youth in Revolt. Jesse Eisenberg did it in The Double. Jake Gyllenhaal did it in Enemy. Now it's Robert Pattinson's turn. Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17 is the latest movie that asks its leading man to play two versions of themselves, one a socially awkward nebbish, the other a confident and sinister alpha male. Pattinson plays the part(s) well, but the movie around him is a fiasco, perhaps the worst ever made by a filmmaker directly after landing a Best Picture Oscar.
Loosely adapted from Edward Ashton's novel 'Mickey7' (the film went into production before the novel was published, with liberal changes made to the narrative), Mickey 17 boasts and squanders a fun premise. In the near future, science has discovered a way to bring people back from the dead via a form of human 3D printing (an idea explored more successfully in the recent Czech sci-fi thriller Restore Point). While the process is banned on Earth, the same laws don't apply in outer space and so volunteers known as "expendables" are hired to serve as human guinea pigs to test if distant planets are inhabitable. One such expendable is Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), who volunteers for the role to escape violent debt collectors back on Earth.
When we first meet Mickey he's in his 17th incarnation and seems about to perish after falling deep into a crevice on the planet Niflheim. Mickey is surprised when Niflheim's inhabitants - creatures that resemble a cuddly miniature version of Dune's sandworms - don't eat him as expected but instead lead him to safety. When Mickey returns to base he's shocked to discover that because he was presumed dead, a new version of himself, Mickey 18, has been printed, and is now living with his girlfriend (Naomi Ackie).
It takes a long time for Mickey 17 to set up this premise, forcing us to sit through a host of interminable and unnecessary flashbacks. Once the plot is in motion, the film doesn't know what to do next. Very little is made of the comic potential of the two physically identical yet very different Mickeys, as the film gets distracted with other subplots and side characters, including Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a Trump-esque politician who hopes to turn Niflheim into a white supremacist colony planet; a criminal played by Steven Yeun who is dodging the same money-lenders as Mickey; and a horny French girl (Anamaria Vartolomei) who has the hots for Mickey. The movie fails to provide an explanation for why after remaining the same nebbishy Mickey for 17 incarnations, the 18th version of Mickey has not only a completely different personality but a different voice (17 sounds like Tobey Maguire, 18 like Michael Madsen).
Far from naturally complementing one another, the various subplots bash against each other and prove a distraction from whatever the overall plot actually is. Much of Mickey 17 plays like a failed TV pilot, wasting time setting up characters that we're never going to spend any real time with. Ackie, Vartolomei and Yeun try their best to make something of their paper thin roles, but Ruffalo is absolutely taking the piss with an embarrassingly bad Trump impersonation that quickly becomes annoying. Marshall's motivations are never entirely clear, and we're often left wondering why he allows Mickey to throw a spanner in his works. There are other confusing aspects, like Mickey's sudden recovery from food poisoning when Marshall's wife (Toni Collette) uses him as a tester for her new line of sauces.
Filmed as far back as 2022, Mickey 17 spent a lot of time sitting on a shelf before Warners decided to unleash it on an unprepared public. It smacks of a troubled production, complete with voice-over narration that desperately tries to explain the rules of this world to the audience but mostly just describes the action we're seeing on screen. The storytelling here is so messy that watching Mickey 17 is like listening to a drunk try to tell a complicated joke. The movie will introduce a concept and then waste 10 minutes over-explaining it with flashbacks. Mickey 17 is a film that presumes its audience are morons, and its contempt for the viewer is summed up when Pattinson's voiceover tells us that 17 is followed by 18. With its juvenile humour and mugging performances, Mickey 17 plays like a love letter to the awful sci-fi movies of Luc Besson, but with the brightness turned down.
Directed by: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo
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