Mickey Barnes can’t die. Not really. Or rather, he can die over and over again, but it never really sticks. It’s a framework we’ve seen before in a long line of movies using this structure as leverage to open an existential puzzle box—Groundhog Day meets Edge of Tomorrow, if you will. In the case of Mickey 17’s subject, his immortality is tethered to his profession as human guinea pig. His job is to die in the name of science, advancement, and capital gains, the semi-logical endpoint of the modern working stiff. And when he does, a new version is simply printed out to commence yet another experiment, coal for the furnace. Director and screenwriter Bong Joon-ho is both gleeful and sympathetic in his depiction of Mickey’s dreadful, yet not hopeless, existence on a distant snow planet. Mickey is a victim, retaining a glint of humanity even as he becomes arguably less human in any real sense.
There’s an easy joke to be made about Mickey 17 in which audiences, exasperated with Hollywood’s constant regurgitation, decry the fact that we haven’t even seen Mickeys 1 through 16. Upon seeing the film, though, I’m tempted to question whether the descriptor “17” refers not only to the version of Mickey who’ll become our hero, but also to the version of Joon-ho’s script we see on the screen. To both its credit and, at times, its detriment, his film is simply overflowing with ideas. Part clever slapstick comedy, part overt social commentary, and part goofy creature feature, Mickey 17 ping-pongs between tones within single sentences, much less scenes. Even after a series of nested intros handled by Robert Pattinson doing a voice somewhere between craggy Chicago detective and cartoon mouse, Bong largely dispels with the traditional three-act structure, instead favoring frantic chaos.
When the primary plot does eventually take shape, it's because Mickey, through an unfortunate case of mistaken demise, is split into two corporeal forms—a big no-no in the world of Mickey 17. It’s here, especially, where you feel the movie attempt to perform a similar feat, struggling against the confines of its own being. Subplots include a misbegotten love triangle, fetishistic gangster revenge, futuristic drug use, biochemical weapons production, and alien-based culinary pursuits. That’s before I get into whatever the hell it is Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are up to as the absurdist windbag leaders of this interstellar exposition. Ruffalo especially—sporting garish fake teeth and hamming it to the rafters as a failed politician and insane capitalist showman—threatens to pull the film apart at the seams.
And yet, even as Bong inevitably struggles to keep all of these balls in the air, and even as I can sit and playfully pick it apart, Mickey 17 remains so much goddamn fun that any attempt to kill it would be as futile as killing Mickey himself. The joy comes from Joon-ho’s complete lack of preciousness concerning the whole thing. His abandonment of any of the film’s dozen subplots isn’t negligence but showmanship, sleights of hand allowing for the most bugnuts outcome to seem plausible, if not inevitable. Pattinson, to his credit, is incredibly game, his buoyant, whiplash energy banging around the grey hull of their existence with an indulgence that suits the film wonderfully.
Ultimately, Mickey 17 falls much closer to Okja or Snowpiercer than any of Joon-ho’s South Korean features. Sure, it may be a fair bit more expendable than the searing class commentary of his Oscar-winning Parasite, but hell if it isn’t full of life.
