Mickey 17 (2025)

Mickey 17 is pretty much a mixed bag. There is a lot to like and a lot not to. High concept absurd satire is hard to pull off and Joon-ho takes a good a swing as anyone but doesn't quite succeed. Pattinson, on his tour of wacky roles hoping to shake off the sparkle of Twilight, pulls off another great performance here playing a number of roles quite well. Unfortunately most of the rest of the (normally quite stellar) cast is just hamming it up. 

Mickey 17's big ideas get pushed to the side often to service the jokes. There will be an interesting thread happens that uses up its usefulness and then gets dropped. The movie is sold in ads through the gimmick of the "expendable" character being sent to die again and again and being reborn into a clone body. But the movie isn't interested in that much, not even as a metaphor for capitalism's exploitation of labour. It moves into it's fascination with "multiples" and even begins to push some comfort with a rather junior-high level tease of a threesome which conveniently gets sidelines before it can become anything too weird. 

The film dodges bullets like that quite a bit. When it starts to get interestingly weird, someone conveniently takes the story in another direction. Much of the script just shifts from one idea to the next without having to commit. The film flirts with a queer character but keeps her queerness sidelined only acknowledging it in passing. The film flirts with totalitarian impulses but just shuffles that off by the end without any real processing of the themes. And it's always done with a sarcastic dark comedy vibe so that we never feel it too much. 

Joon-ho visually creates a stunning world to set his story in and while I appreciated it sometimes it was a distraction from the weaknesses in the story. Mickey 17 walks up to the line of asking quite a few interesting questions but then always just steps back to never deal with it, often in ways that just aren't super convincing. It may be mostly a miss but often it is fascinating to watch the spectacular swing before the strike is called. 

Mickey 17

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo 

Writer/Director: Bong Joon-ho