Mickey 17
After walking into a bad business deal with his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), then being threatened with chainsaw dismemberment by sadistic loan shark Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore), Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to become an expendable on a 4 1/2 year mission to the icy planet Niflheim (named after the mythological Norse dark ice world of the dead) without having read the terms of the contract. Subjected to lethal experiments and missions only to die and be reprinted with his stored memories uploaded, things get even more dire when a new, psychopathic version is created after everyone assumes the demise of "Mickey 17."
Laura's Review: C+
Six years after creating the first non-English language film to win the Best Picture Oscar, writer/director Bong Joon Ho returns with a problematic film that's been bounced around the release calendar. His adaptation of Edward Ashton's novel 'Mickey 7' starts promisingly, Pattinson going into full dimwitted stooge mode as the object of some very black comedy, but once the plot thickens its strands begin to unravel and the film becomes a weak mash-up of "Snowpiercer" crossed with "Okja."
We begin in the middle, Mickey's seventeenth iteration having fallen through the snow to land far below, Timo, having snagged a job as a pilot, arriving to retrieve his weapon but leave his friend to what he rationalizes is his inevitable death, something which will spur a reprint. Nonetheless, Mickey doesn't like dying and this death looks like it's going to be particularly nasty as shaggy creatures with gaping, grasping maws for undersides come tumbling out of a crevice.
After going back and catching us up, we'll see Mickey terrorized before he even boards the spacecraft, told that his first 'test of commitment' will be to shoot himself in the head. We'll then meet up with him in a cafeteria line, served unappetizing food that is all he has to live for. His status as an expendable means that only colleagues who want to ask him what it feels like to die bother with him, until, that is, the beautiful Nasha (Naomi Ackie, "Blink Twice") beckons him silently to come sit next to her as everyone's attention is drawn by the entrance of mission commander Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, hamming it up with a set of false teeth) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). While the idiotically tyrannical Marshall lectures on conserving calories, Mickey and Nasha indulge in so much sex, they create their own book of erotic diagrams. Nasha also consoles Mickey as he endures being subjected to radiation and other inhumane treatment at the hands of the science team led by Arkady (Cameron Britton, 2022's "A Man Called Otto"), only Dorothy (Patsy Ferran, "Living") compassionate enough to notice new Mickey's are being spit out of the printer onto the floor. And Mickey's treatment worsens after Jennifer (Ellen Robertson) dies instead of him when he is out on a mission and the creatures newly dubbed creepers by Marshall seemingly attack, leaving Jennifer's 'best friend' Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei, "Happening") bereft.
Mickey didn't die at all when those creepers came out, instead being hoisted up and thrown out of the snow collapse, but after he makes his arduous way back to his spaceship he'll learn that not only is his supposed friend Timo selling pure oxy to other shipmates, but Mickey now has a 'multiple,' meaning one of them will be put down. And when his multiple heads towards Nasha after trying to kill him, it will be Kai who finds the two with a delighted Nasha, turned on by both the illicit drug and her dual lovers. Kai, who'd recently helped Mickey evade death yet again at the hands of Marshall, tries to make a deal to keep the nicer one, but Nasha is having none of it. Then a whole new subplot involving the creepers and Marshall's plan to exterminate them all hijacks the plot, if not exactly engaging the audience.
Outside of Ylfa, whose entire existence revolves around creating sauces to disguise revolting food, the two main female characters seem to switch motivation somewhere off screen, as if the film has been reedited one time too many. Pacing begins to lag even as Joon Ho tries to add tension with the torture of a creeper baby whose fate will determine that of the human invaders. The film's special effects add some amount of interest (art direction ranges from what looks like the interior of the Guggenheim Museum to lackluster industrial spaceship interiors) and the duplication of Pattinson is seamless, but "Mickey 17" feels like warmed over leftovers.
Warner Brothers releases "Mickey 17" in theaters on 3/7/25.
