MICKEY 17

TWO STARS Mickey is an Expendable. His job is to die, be reprinted, and die another day.

SCI-FI COMEDY DRAMA US English #MICKEY17 Starring Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo

On the run from loan-sharks, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up as an Expendable on a Mission to colonise a new planet. He gets the dangerous jobs knowing that if he dies, his body will be reprinted and his memories uploaded to a brand new Mickey. By the time we join his story, we’re up to the seventeenth version and he’s still entirely onboard with the concept of death. 

In the hands of idiosyncratic director Bong Joon Ho (THE PARASITES) this comedy-satire has the potential to skewer many a convention from corporate manipulation and colonisation to genocide and the value of life, cloned or otherwise. Big themes. He ups the ante following a long back-story that gallops through many Mickeys and a callous disregard The Mission has for his wellbeing. It’s here that lazy bureaucracy prints out a Mickey 18 before 17 has actually died; a problem because duplicates pose the moral dilemma of one soul shared and are therefore illegal. Not that Mickey’s gleeful girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) is troubled - two identical boyfriends is something she’s perfectly happy about.

Meanwhile, The Mission discovers their destination is not terra nullius but a planet inhabited with‘creepers’, a kind of wooly armadillo that they assume to be dangerous. They’re not as Mickey learns when saved from certain death (inadvertently causing his duplication) but that doesn’t stop the oily commander Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his slimy wife (Toni Collette) from exhorting death to Creepers on the ship’s late-night TV show. More themes for Joon Ho to get his teeth into.

Or so you might think. Despite the film’s great potential, MICKEY 17 is more often a disappointing pool of poorly executed ideas. The frustration rests in lost opportunity, like his cult SNOWPIERCER where big ideas are lost in the chaos that surrounds them. To helps us through there are moments of genuine amusement (such as one of the Mickeys printing straight to the floor because no one remembered the table), but mostly the story lands like material from Second Comedian on try-out night. As for the bite of satire, it has all the teeth of one his Creepers - far too cute, far too obvious.

Eventually it falls to the Mickeys to save the Creepers and by extension themselves (himself?) though how much you’re invested in the outcome depends largely on how much Joon Ho has won your enthusiasm. Arguably, not enough. Pattinson is engaging and differentiates his dual roles admirably, likewise Ackie’s spritely Nasha curries favour. Much less so Ruffalo and Colette who are more indicative of the film’s malaise - overplayed, one note grotesques that lean far too heavily on political contemporaries to be interesting characters in their own right. It’s droll, to begin with, but they, like the film, soon outstay their welcome. 

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