I got the impression that, quite frankly, Warner Brothers didn’t know what to do with Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to his Oscar winning Parasite. Mickey 17 was, I believe, intended to come out last year, but the release date was moved around quite a bit. Sure, it’s out now, but I figured one thing before it came out: it was probably going to be nothing like what Warner Brothers would normally release. Also, it’s Bong Joon-ho’s work, so there’s bound to be some social commentary the likes of which a big movie studio probably wouldn’t do on their own. I mean, is Warner Brothers going do release something that offer a veiled critique of the capitalist system like many of Bong Joon-ho’s filmography? I doubt it.
Anyway, Mickey 17 is out now.
Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is in a bit of trouble when he and his best pal Timo (Steven Yeun) run afoul of a loan shark at some point in the future. The only solution for Mickey is to get onboard a colony ship and go to another planet under the direction of former Congressman Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a politician with a devoted group of supporters with some very distinctive hats, as well as Marshall’s wife, the sauce-obsessed Ylfa (Toni Collette). Mickey doesn’t have any real skills or the sort of talk-his-way-out-of-most-trouble ways of Timo, so he signs on to be the ship’s “expendable” worker, a fellow who gets the truly dangerous assignments because, if he dies, he’ll just get a new body created and his memories downloaded back in. Effectively, every time he dies, he’s cloned and revived.
Mickey’s life, or lives since he’s on the 17th iteration, does have one bright spot in the form of his girlfriend, security officer Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), but upon arrival on the colony world, the colonists discover a species of aliens that they quickly dub “creepers.” Sent out to bring a creeper in, Mickey has an accident and is assumed dead. However, he isn’t, but when he returns to his room, it’s already occupied by his 18th clone, and Mickey 18 is a bit more ruthless than Mickey 17. That’s for good reason: under the law, if multiples exist, then the whole line is wiped out. Can Mickey figure a way out of all this without losing his head?
I went into this movie wanting to like it, but I couldn’t quite get to it. The tone is a bit all-over-the-place, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for from the trailers. Pattinson is fine as the two Mickeys, one of whom is less inclined to let things slide than the other. The look of the film is dank and gloomy, and the story does, for the most part, work. There’s just one element to the movie I didn’t much care for, and it really brought down my whole opinion of the movie, and the source of that disappointment is the thing I found most surprising: Mark Ruffalo.
I genuinely like Ruffalo in just about everything he’s done, but he doesn’t really work here. Despite the fact the director has said that Ruffalo is not a stand-in for the current American president, he sure does have a lot of superficial things in common with the guy. The problem there is Ruffalo’s performance does seem like some sort of Trump impression, but it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Say what you will about Mr. Trump, but he does have some practiced charisma that works for his followers if nothing else. I don’t see why anyone would want to adore Ruffalo’s Marshall here, and Colette’s turn as his partner-in-crime wife is equally baffling. How did these two get a political cult of followers? Even in-universe he’s portrayed as a somewhat unlikely political force, to put it kindly. Given Ruffalo and Colette are basically the movie’s villains, it wasn’t so much that I wanted them to lose to the Mickeys, but I just didn’t want them to be in the movie. They really did hurt the movie, and I wanted to like this one a whole lot more.
Grade: C
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