He shattered the one-inch wall (that little strip of subtitles Hollywood has always seemed so averse to) when Parasite became the first ever foreign-language winner of the best picture Oscar in 2020.
So it was no surprise that Warner Bros were happy to throw a big, juicy $100m-plus budget at South Korean director Bong Joon Ho for his next project (his third English-language feature). Or that an enviable squadron of talent was queueing up to get on board.
However, Bong is something of a random generator pinball machine when it comes to genres; previous outings have included neo-noir crime (Memories of Murder), creature feature (The Host) and dark social satire (Parasite). So it’s predictably unpredictable that Mickey 17 (based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton) is a wacky, sci-fi black comedy with more than a passing dig at our current, geo-expansive world leaders.
And the main stand-out of the plot (multiple Robert Pattinsons) is surely a winner; if anyone had a machine in their basement that could reproduce limitless human beings, RPatz would be near the top of many lists for a large print run.
Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes who, along with friend Timo (Steven Yuen), signs up for a colonising expedition to an ice planet to escape a chainsaw-wielding debt collector. That the name of the colony, Niflheim, seems to be pronounced “Nippleheim” (anyone else?) entirely suits the silly tone.
Mickey, a lovably simple doormat of an everyman in the vein of Forrest Gump, chooses the duff job: he’s an “expendable” who gets sent on certain death missions. When he does inevitably croak it, his brain is simply downloaded into a brand new body. Not exactly the most original concept, but it’s rather lovely watching naked Pattinsons repeatedly plop out of something resembling an MRI scanner.
The leader of this colonial crusade is super-ego politico Kenneth Marshall, played with unhinged, evangelical abandon by Mark Ruffalo in a voice bearing a distinct similarity to one (god, he’s ubiquitous right now) Donald Trump. And whether it was CGI-ed in after he became prime minister or I’m just imagining it, a Keir Starmer-alike also appears to be sitting silently in the background in one scene.
Villain sidekick to Marshall is his equally pantomimic wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), gurning like a vamp at his shoulder to his every word. With a lust for zhuzhing-up the extremely dull cuisine aboard their spaceship, Ylfa’s character is reduced like a heavily boiled jus to a simple cartoonish obsession that’s one of the funniest things in the movie. “Sauce,” she declares, “is the true test of civilisation!”
Of course, the moment audiences will be waiting for is when the strict rule of only printing a new expendable once the previous version has died is broken, and Mickey 18 arrives to surprise the bejesus out of Mickey 17. If No17 is a bit too loveable and lame, fear not: No18 is a mischievous, glinty-eyed horndog who immediately cracks on to some naughty chemsex with 17’s girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie, brilliantly kick-ass and with a fine line in shouting “f***-face”).
Pattinson does his usual turn of semi-perfection, somehow breathing life and difference into the two-dimensional Mickeys. Minor scene-stealer, though, is Tim Key (Bong clearly has a taste for British humour) in a psychedelic pigeon suit as a kind of master of ceremonies.
All the ramshackle shards of this cluster-farce come to a semblance of resolution after Marshall is unmasked as an evil eugenicist and the indigenous creatures of Niflheim, dubbed “creepers” (or “shit-covered croissants”, as Ylfa describes them) are threatened with extermination.
With a release date coming in the immediate wake of the Oscars, Mickey 17 never seemed likely to be as good as Parasite. It just doesn’t have the same gravitas and edge, but with its maelstrom of nonsense and loveable stars on top form, it’s a rampantly fun cosmic caper.
Mickey 17 is in cinemas now
