Director: Bong Joon Ho
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo 
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 137 mins

Mickey 17 is the new film by Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean auteur’s follow-up to his 2020 Best Picture award winning Parasite. Based on a novel by Edward Ashton, the film is set in the year 2054 and follows Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who joins a space colony headed by Trump-like politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Mickey joins as an ‘Expendable’, which means he gets cloned and reprinted by a state-of-the-art machine every time he dies for research purposes. As you can imagine, he receives some pretty dangerous missions. When the seventeenth Mickey iteration is tasked with capturing an indigenous lifeform called a ‘creeper’ on the snowy planet of Niflheim, he falls into an ice fissure and his colleague, Timo (Steven Yeun) reports his death. However, Mickey 17 survives the fall and when he’s back on board the spaceship, he meets the new and more aggressive Mickey 18. Since ‘Multiples’ are banned on board, that inevitably introduces some difficulties. 

Like most of Bong Joon Ho’s work, Mickey 17 is a strange piece full of biting satire and veers erratically between genres, from slapstick to absurdism to horror and back again. There’s a handful of laughs but it would be fair to say a lot of the humour doesn’t land either. While the film’s always entertaining, Mickey 17 is unfortunately rather messy and it’s particularly odd how the film abandons its cloning storyline half-way through to then focus on the themes of colonisation between species. Fortunately, I was more interested in the film’s second half and it’s always better for a film to end on a high note. The film’s visually interesting and some of the otherworldly landscapes are beautifully shot by Darius Khondji. There’s also an interesting score by Jung Jae-Il, although some of the song choices are on-the-nose.

Robert Pattinson makes a good effort as the titular Mickey but the kooky performance didn’t really work for me. It feels akin to a character a young Johnny Depp would have excelled at. Faring better is Naomi Ackie’s love interest Nasha, who stands by Mickey through thick and thin and although Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-like politician feels rather stale (despite the director insisting the character is an amalgamation of many historical dictators), there’s no denying the actor’s entertaining effort. Toni Collette also has fun as Marshall’s devious wife with sinister designs of her own. 

Mickey 17 is certainly distinctive and feels like a mash-up of The Host and Okja. But it’s a disappointment when you consider the film as a follow-up to the pitch-perfect Parasite. Still, at least Bong Joon Ho has gone and made something on his own terms and I’m glad it exists, even if it falls short of his best work.