'Mickey 17' briefing

1 ½ (out of 4)

            “Oh Mickey’s asinine, so asinine it blows my mind HEY MICKEY, BJH you icky!”

Here I was thinking Bong Joon-Ho couldn’t possibly carry his bright, shiny, boundless clout into a dud or even something slightly underwhelming… Maybe he wanted to put together a movie so different from his history-making Best Picture winner Parasite that he had to produce a pile of shit! Five years waiting on where that once in a lifetime filmmaking prestige will inspire in him and it's a satire with nothing salient to impart, a sci-fi story with precisely zero contemplative wrinkles in theme or story, a caustic comedy built on broad, brainless caricatures and almost negative laughs. Mickey 17 is a textbook blank check movie and clearly WB had no clue how to market it, though I now see their task was impossible.

Why not begin with the politics since they’re as conspicuous as possible. Bong’s third English language feature is seismic in its unsubtly, and the previous anti-capitalist/class crisis illustrations of Snowpiercer and the bleeding-heart animal rights anthem Okja had messages burned in floodlights. Obviously it doesn’t take political affiliation to be anti-corporation but this particular movie’s vendetta against Donald Trump is almost a surer smear than last year’s The Apprentice — it’s more difficult to locate the purpose of Mark Ruffalo’s false-toothed fucking-about than it was to unravel Pedro Pascal’s positively orange turn in Wonder Woman 1984. Poor Toni Collette, you know things are bad when she can’t make it look easy, even with all the Trump hate in Knives Out she still had a character to act out. But really Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up is probably this movie’s closest companion for dimwitted MSNBC outrage dressed up as a “sophisticated lampoon” and this movie’s floundered big-league sci-fi intentions are as if Alexander Payne’s Downsizing turned out even more embarrassing.

Mickey 17 clearly borrows all of its anti-colonial space-traversing directly from Paul Verhoeven’s playbook for Starship Troopers, except in that Mickey feels more like a kids movie, full of banal, soapy moralizing and farcical villains — the issue is when you want to make your movie politics-forward, if you’re short of a film-school-rotation masterpiece you not only instantly age your current crap but you ultimately end up with something edgy yet totally safe, in this case a Sunday school lesson with cursing, gore and threesomes. Now’s as good a time as any to point out that the other internationally esteemed South Korean filmmaking force Park Chan-Wook (especially comparing this detritus to his last masterpiece Decision to Leave) leaves no room to believe Bong is the best import we have. Turn after turn Bong can’t match Park’s lethal cool — as evidenced by bold beauties like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and The Handmaiden, Chan-wook has a preference for temperament and inference over plot and logic to go with the epic solemnity, disarming irony, and merry morbidity. 

For more seeing-double via clone wars, I feel like World of Tomorrow, Moon, The Prestige, The Substance and possibly Oblivion as well made better on their respective existential speculation and genre fun, Christ, even Gemini Man might have the upper hand… In his dual performance, Robert Pattinson is just too unfamiliar with comedy, or assuming multiple characters, or I’ll happily fault a garbage screenplay — I had a better time watching Ezra Miller play with himself in The Flash. Pattinson’s only ever flexed his funny bones incidentally through Twilight’s senseless sagas, or the Batman movie, or Remember Me, or more intentionally in bits of Tenet and The Lighthouse, listen I don’t deny his ability to delight. It’s just his character, the 17th Mickey Barnes, is boring as heck as a sort of everyman perspective on the future, and Mickey 18 is just angrier and laying off 17’s superficial higher pitch, a ridiculous point of contrast when they’re supposed to be IDENTICAL DAMMIT. It’s sad to watch him tread water when I know he could match Jake Gyllenhaal (Enemy), Jesse Eisenberg (The Double), maybe even Jeremy Irons (Dead Ringers) or Nicolas Cage (Adaptation) in the right doppelgänger scenario.

There’s just little command of the craft on display. The only thing to even remotely compare to Parasite would be an epilogue that somehow outdoes the preceding images in some kind of lucid film poetry — here it’s like the possible-future-dream right out of Breaking Dawn Part Two, but given how much of Mickey’s 137 minutes test the cinematically stoic, anything to break from the lecturing and listless entertainment value is welcome even in the last five minutes. For the most Marxist filmmaker we’ve got this movie ain’t exactly a surprise but its certainly about as tone deaf and woefully misguided as I’ve ever seen leftist filmmaking get — at least Parasite keeps you glued and has artistry far beyond eat-the-rich bellyaching. But Jesus, there’s no excuse for a film this late in his career to look so much worse than The Host or Snowpiercer, and for that matter you can hardly believe this guy created something as akin to perfection as Memories of Murder, or a dark comedy debut as bright and bitter as Barking Dogs Never Bite. This dime-store dystopia aches for more inventive insight, actualized absurdity, more thematic layers, more organic tonal schizophrenia and more unusual universality.