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“Mickey 17” is the latest firecracker placed between our toes by the South Korean director/prankster/genius Bong Joon Ho. It’s his first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.
As the film opens, we’re a few decades into the future and a space colonization mission under the leadership of messianic ex-Congressman Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is trying to set up shop on the ice planet of Niflheim. Among the many busy worker bees under his leadership is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a sweet but hapless schmendrick who has made the mistake of signing up as the colony’s “Expendable.” A new technology allows human beings to be “reprinted” when they die, body and memories intact, and while Expendables are too controversial to be permitted on Earth, they make a fine test case for interstellar exploration.
Need someone to fix a spaceship exterior while getting blasted by deadly radiation? Use an Expendable – you can always print a new one. (And it really is a printer, ka-chunging out a new body like an old Epson dot-matrix and dumping the results on the floor if you forget the tray.)
So poor Mickey signs up to be the canary in the colony’s coal mine. Between the radiation, serving as a guinea pig for an antiviral vaccine and other mishaps, he’s already gone through Mickeys 1 through 16 when the movie begins and is up to Mickey Version 17. It’s not a bad life, or lives. He has a devoted girlfriend in security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie of “Blink Twice”), a slippery best buddy in Timo (the always-welcome Steven Yeun) and the condescending admiration of the other colonists, who see Mickey as their personal village idiot but who also really want to know what dying feels like. Wouldn’t you want to know, too?
As is his wont, Bong slips the obvious ethical/existential issues under the skin of a diabolical sci-fi action comedy. Based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, “Mickey 17” finds the director back in his wheelhouse of day-after-tomorrow satire following the contemporary head games of “Parasite.” The new film is very much in line with 2006’s “The Host” (Bong’s idea of a Godzilla movie), 2013’s “Snowpiercer” (humanity stuck on a trans-global bullet train, rich folk in the front and the poor in steerage) and 2017’s “Okja” (about a girl and her two-ton, genetically modified super-pig). Dig deep enough and you’ll find a molten core of class rage, nurtured in South Korea’s stratified society and easily exported for use in English-language blockbusters. But Bong is also a born filmmaker, and he dramatizes the deadly serious war between the haves and have-nots with slapstick invention that translates to irresistible entertainment.
Here, his chosen instrument of subversion is Pattinson, an actor whom the masses may still dismiss as that pretty-boy vampire from the “Twilight” movies but who the attentive know is a gifted and playfully eccentric taker of risks. For Mickey 17, Pattinson adopts the affectless voice and shambling posture of a likable loser – it’s an enjoyable performance, but you think that’s all there is to it until Mickey 18 shows up.
Wait, who’s Mickey 18? Through complications I won’t spoil, two Mickeys suddenly exist at the same time, and while the philosophical implications of non-selfhood get a brief chewing over, “Mickey 17” is more intrigued by the differences between the two. If Mickey 17 is a bit of a milquetoast, Mickey 18 is a bit of a psycho – a swaggering alpha male who kicks the movie’s plot into high gear. Among other things, Bong makes sure we see Nasha’s eyes light up at the prospect of having two Mickeys in her bed – the nice guy AND the bad boy. (She calls them “Mild” and “Habanero,” but whatever.)
It’s in the contrast between the two characters that a viewer takes the measure of Pattinson’s talent, his knack for physical comedy and the subtlety with which he embodies each Mickey’s best and worst traits. He – they – IT – are a marvel. Meanwhile, over in the other corner, Ruffalo is giving a master class in outsize political satire, playing the colony’s cult head by rolling up every jingoistic bully you can imagine into one overinflated buffoon. There’s Elon’s blithering, blinkered self-regard in there, and Mussolini’s posture, Dear Orange Leader’s speech patterns and RFK Jr.’s teeth. It ain’t subtle, but it’s a hoot. (Toni Collette doesn’t get a lot to do as the character’s wife, the brains behind the throne, but there’s always too much going on in a Bong movie – that’s the fun of them and sometimes the liability.)
I haven’t mentioned the scuttling creatures that run rampant on Niflheim, dubbed “creepers” and looking like a cross between a buffalo and a microscopic water bear. They’re possibly more sentient than the colonists would like to admit – “Don’t call them aliens,” Mickey 17 cautions someone. “WE’RE the aliens.” – and the final scenes of “Mickey 17” envision a snowy showdown between Them and Us that brings the movie to a clattery and generally satisfying finale.
A Bong Joon Ho film tends to spin faster and faster as it goes, wild with invention, high spirits and a fury toward the people in charge that we’re invited to apply to our own lives once the lights come up. To them, we’re all replaceable, re-printable and expendable. In “Mickey 17,” the toner’s running low and we’ve just about had enough.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
Three stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material. 137 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.