Sci-fi black comedy Mickey 17 a flop

Four-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo and Australia’s Toni Collette mush through two of the cheesiest roles imaginable.

Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette in Mickey 17

Mickey 17 (M)
2hr 17min
In cinemas

★★½

There’s a bit of on-screen torture in the sci-fi black comedy Mickey 17 but the unintended one, I assume, is being forced to watch four-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo and Australia’s Toni Collette mush through two of the cheesiest roles imaginable. In this space, no one will hear you laugh.

The time is 2054 and Ruffalo, who received an Oscar nomination and showed his comic chops in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023), is Kenneth Marshall, a failed American politician who, backed by a corporate church, heads an expedition to colonise Niflheim, a snow-covered planet.

Collette is his wife Ylfa, the power behind the madman. When she’s not managing her unhinged husband, she makes culinary sauces, believing them to be the watermark of elite civilisation. Collette, also an Oscar nominee, for The Sixth Sense (1999), does her best, but it’s a small bottle to squeeze.

The titular Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson), birth name Mickey Barnes, signs up for the expedition to flee a loan shark who wants him dead. Paradoxically, he joins as an “expendable”: someone who can die and, thanks to cloning technology, be resurrected the next day at the flick of a switch.

Robert Pattinson in a scene from the movie Mickey 17.

This film is written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. His previous film, Parasite (2019), is the first non-English-language film to win a best picture Oscar. Bong also won best director and best original script.

Mickey 17 is a loose adaptation of the 2022 novel Mickey 7 by American writer Edward Ashton. Bong says he wrote the script with no real politicians in mind but there are a few obvious connections. Marshall’s supporters wear red baseball caps; the description “expendables” is not far removed from Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”; and Marshall’s vow to populate a planet with “superior people” seems a prescient nod to White House resident Elon Musk.

Mickey’s expendability is detailed in the early scenes, which include most of the torture. In his 17th iteration there are two important developments: first, he falls in love with a security agent, Nasha (British actor Naomi Ackie); second, he’s wrongly presumed dead and an 18th Mickey is created. The 18th Mickey is tougher. Pattinson plays both and his particularly physical performance is the highlight of the film. He’s an interesting actor who has chosen to walk a long path from the 2008-12 Twilight sagas.

The clash of the two Mickeys – aka illegal “multiples” – has some similarities to The Substance, in cinemas now, which is a far better film and for which Demi Moore should have won an Oscar.

Robert Pattinson in a scene from the movie Mickey 17.

The rest of the film is a struggle for power between the dual Mickeys, Nasha, the Trumpish-Putinish politician and his wife and the indigenous inhabitants of Niflheim, who look and act like overgrown, over-educated armadillos.

The director touches on important issues, such as how the colonial mind likes to “eliminate dangerous species”, and what it feels like to die (the question Mickey 17 is asked regularly), but doesn’t quite follow through. The result is overlong and disjointed – the latter of which Mickey is familiar with.