Mickey 17

Grade: C+

Robert Pattinson is an underrated actor. I wrote him off during the Twilight phenomenon, but since being liberated from Edward Cullen, he’s really gotten to let loose and shine. I enjoyed him opposite Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse, he provided a voice in the American-dubbed version of The Boy and the Heron – and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what he’s done since Breaking Dawn – Part 2 ended that professional chapter. He is very good as the title character in Mickey 17, in what’s actually two performances – but I’ll get to that in a minute. It’s easy to forget that he’s from London. Here, he puts on a slightly high-pitched, nasal tone with a little bit of rasp. He sounds like Michael J. Fox inhaled some helium. It’s not annoying, it’s endearing.

It’s 2054. Many of us will still be around then. Pattinson as Mickey, along with his friend Timo, owe some money to a couple of gangsters, so they skip town. Skip planet, to be more precise. They leave Earth to join a spaceship that’s making a 4+ year expedition to a new planet, which the travelers will colonize and populate. Everybody’s looking forward to doing the thing we’ve all been thinking about since age 12, as that activity is outlawed on the ship. Without reading the fine print, Mickey hastily signs up to be what’s called an expendable. It’s a tool for research. The higher-ups can see what will kill people, which will help them in developing various vaccines and other safeguards. Expendables are the guinea pigs who will die multiple times, and get reprinted with the same bodies and memories, like a new iPhone that’s been synced with all the same stuff you had on the last one. The Mickey we follow for most of the movie is the seventeenth version.

It’s an intriguing premise. He’s constantly asked “what’s it like to die?” One day, Mickey 17 is left for dead in a snowy cave, and everyone assumes he will be eaten by these crawly creatures that look like a croissant was dipped in poop – so they go ahead and print a Mickey 18. The queen mother, for some reason, spares 17, and even helps him get back. He returns to find another one of him. There are harsh laws against multiples.

Pattinson is very good as both Mickeys, often seen at the same time. I’d compare it to Nicolas Cage as the twin writers in Adaptation. There is never any question about who is who. 18 is kind of arrogant and a bit of a freewheeling womanizer, and “our” Mickey, 17, is the noble hero of the story. This is enough for a whole film, but then it tries to do too much by piling on subplots involving political commentary, and a war against the croissant turds.

Mark Ruffalo plays the leader of it all. His performance annoyed the ever loving mess out of me, and the inspiration for it is anything but subtle. He’s a pompous dictator with squinty eyes and pursed lips, who likes to brag about himself. Does that remind you of anybody? His wife, played by Toni Collette, has been compared to Tammy Faye Bakker. Nobody could possibly take any scene with them seriously. So much of the movie is played up into ridiculous grotesque camp.

Other performances are more down-to-earth, no pun intended. Pattinson, as I said, fares well, as does Naomi Ackie (Blink Twice, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody) as his girlfriend, Steven Yeun as Timo, and Anamaria Vartolomei as a passenger who will happily take one of the Mickeys off everyone’s hands. The first half hour, at least, is filled with loads of voice-over narration, just bringing us up to speed. I figured once we were finally caught up, it would settle into a simple story. Unfortunately, it loses focus and breaks off into numerous half-baked storylines. We waited half a decade for Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up project to his historic Oscar winner. I was hoping for better from the director of Parasite.

Grade: C+