What The Hell America!

Nobody could be sadder than I am to report that Mickey 17 is a disappointment.

I’ve been waiting eagerly for many months to see this latest effort by writer-director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Host). I raced out to see it as soon as it opened in theaters, hitting one of its first shows at a multiplex near me and watching it entirely alone in a big empty theater. Maybe that dark solitude made it seem a bit longer than it really was, and a bit more leaden — but not by much. After a fairly energetic start, Mickey 17 drags along like a dying animal, leaking vitality all the way.

It doesn’t help that this dystopian sci-fi comedy seems loaded down by exposition, repeatedly flashing back to show us how some plotty development began. It had seemed like such a surefire premise in the fast and funny film previews about a lowly worker who’s unwittingly agreed to be an “Expendable,” assigned to every fatal hell-job in the galaxy, getting killed and “reprinted” over and over until there’s a system error and Mickey 17 lives to meet his next self, Mickey 18 (both played by Robert Pattinson). What will “Multiples” mean to Mickeys 17 and 18 as well as the sick capitalist system that spawned them?

Pattinson is terrific as the Mickeys. His Mickey 17 is slow and lovable, as soft and trusting as a puppy. But each Mickey has his temperamental variations — there was an earlier “whiny Mickey” — and Mickey 18 emerges with sharper edges. He’s sullen, suspicious, secretive, and ready to fight anyone in order to survive. Pattinson’s heavy, dark eyebrows suddenly intensify as the broodingly resentful Mickey 18. His jaw squares, his movements quicken, his voice roughens. If anyone can throw a wrench into this nightmarish cloning system of labor, he can.

And for a brief time after Mickey 18 arrives, there’s some energy and humor left in the narrative. How to keep their multiplicity a secret in the spaceship-bound colony, where such printing errors lead to certain death for the superfluous copy? Though on the plus side, Mickey 17’s space-cop girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), is thrilled at the sexual possibilities of having two Mickeys, calling them “Mickey Mild” and “Mickey Habanero.”

But the clotted narrative and limping pace gradually chloroform the rest of the film. At the very least, something seems to have gone drastically wrong in the editing room, and rumors of contention between the director and Warner Bros over the final cut of this big-budget effort swirled around the project when its release was delayed from March 2024. But Bong insists there was no rancor or true interference from the studio:

Of course, during the editing process there are many opinions and many discussions that happen. But this film is my cut, and I’m very happy about it. It was a long process, but it was always smooth and respectful.

So there’s nothing for it but to try to figure out what Bong was trying to do in the first place. The early scenes show Mickey’s abject life on Earth as he and his childhood friend, the glib and manipulative Timo (Steven Yeun), fail in their hopeless scheme to create a fast-food macaroons shop. Broke, the two ruined small-time entrepreneurs wind up on the run from a sadistic loan shark who enjoys filming his elaborate torture sessions that end in death for anyone who fails to pay up.

This is how they arrive at the way station trying to board a last-chance spaceship that will take them from planet Earth to the new colony on planet Niflheim. The competition for a seat is fierce, and Mickey is entirely lacking in the useful skills and clever rhetoric that Timo can deploy to persuade a ticket agent to take him on as a pilot. And there’s no doubt Timo would ditch his “friend” here without a backward glance. The undercutting of one worker by another in a dog-eat-dog world, a theme Bong deals with most obviously in Parasite (2019), is exemplified in this film by the way Timo routinely betrays Mickey, and the permanent-patsy way Mickey seems to accept this as a condition for friendship.

Desperate, Mickey signs up to be an Expendable.

“You’re sure you read the paperwork?” clerks and aides keep asking him, and Mickey’s voiceover confesses, “I guess I should’ve read through it.”

That’s when we get the vibrant, rapidly edited scenes of Mickey’s life as an Expendable. “They work me like a dog,” says Mickey, and he dies — by design — at the end of every mission, as scientists are often studying the effects of lethal gases and horrible diseases on him. His body is of such little concern to anyone that, in a beautifully surreal scene, his hand gets accidentally chopped off and goes floating away, drifting into the outer atmosphere past colonists chatting by windows who pay no attention to this bloody, tragicomic “goodbye to all that” wave that represents the last vestiges of Mickey’s human dignity.

Still, the hapless and amiable Mickey has so little sense of self-worth anyway, he cooperates with the grotesque process, reassuring fellow workers about to shove him into a furnace before he’s actually expired with a world-weary, “It’s okay….”

As always, a new version of him is then printed out immediately, using DNA and updated memory transplants that feed into the inkjet-style machine. The latest Mickey comes out at that familiar, stuttering office printer pace, his new body bending limply backward like a sheet of paper. This is fitting given Bong’s stated project for Mickey 17: “Ultimately, the story is about how pathetic humans can be.”

And indeed, it’s clear that while watching this movie, we’re supposed to think about developing events in America, which were pitiful and infuriating even before the daily mayhem of the current regime. Our own increasingly impoverished citizenry running scared and virtually ignored by the psychos in power, but still with no revolt in them, are reflected in all the passive Mickeys being abused, killed by work, and relentlessly revived to do it again.

Bong changed the source material, the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, in order to include a crude and egomaniacal Donald Trump–like head of the space colony named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). A disgraced politician on Earth, but still with fanatical, red-hatted followers, he’s made a comeback ruling the colonized ice planet Niflheim as a self-aggrandizing dictator with white nationalist aspirations and the controlling influence of megarich, megachurch allies. His flighty wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), is obsessed with gourmet sauces, “the foundation of any civilization,” and she’s making a new one from the hacked-off, pureed tails of the planet’s dominant species, which she names “the Creepers.” (Her husband takes credit for the name.)

Ruffalo and Colette, both excellent actors, aren’t to blame for the way these grotesques fall flat. Both characters, as written, have a tired-retread quality to them, as if we’d finally seen one too many SNL skits skewering our loony heads of state. This plays as just another one that drags on for far too long. Their plan to wipe out the Creepers — which turn out to be intelligent beings able to communicate in sophisticated ways — ought to play a lot more urgently than it does, just as their crass insanity ought to be funnier. But as bizarre as all the details are involving this ludicrous future-world, there’s something rote and by-the-numbers about the way the narrative plays out. So many moments of intended comedy and cumulative poignance trail off into nowhere.

Bong is proudly in his wheelhouse with Mickey 17, which he calls “a story about working-class people” focused on a representative figure whose “job is dying.” But, somehow, he steered this ship slowly off course. It’s a heartbreaker, given the flailing state of commercial cinema in general and the paucity of strongly leftist films in particular. And right now, given current events, it’s especially hard to lose the energizing idea of this Bong Joon-ho film so many of us were anticipating, which might’ve been a cheerful juggernaut ripping through public consciousness, eagerly recommended, generating avid conversations — even more of a must-see than Parasite was.

Instead, it’s premiere in theaters appears to be DOA.