After sitting through Bong Joon Ho's follow up to his brilliant "Parasite", I think he's mis-titled his newest work. It should be called MICKEY 17 Audience 0.
In past films like "Snowpiercer", "The Host" and his most recent Best Picture winner, the aforementioned "Parasite", Ho has always displayed a bold visual style, infused with humor and intelligent satire. This feels more like a Three Stooges version of Ho.
The first hour is slow, at times dull as we meet Mickey, a none-too bright wanna be entrepreneur, whose idea for an All Macaroon store has gone belly up. He and his partner Timo (Steven Yeun) funded the venture through a loan shark who'd rather carve his delinquent loan partners into chunks then extend the late fees.
Robert Pattinson (The Batman, Tenet) is very good as Mickey, who's got more heart than brains. Pattinson manages to create a character that's dumb as a box of rocks, but likeable as hell. At first, anyway.
Mickey and Timo decide that the only way to escape their predicament is to jump on an immediate space flight to a distant colony, lead by bombastic, failed politician and cult leader, Kenneth Marshall. The usually reliable Mark Ruffalo gets so caught up in what he sees (and likely Ho sees) as a clever, slapstick takeoff of Donald Trump that he becomes a cartoon. It's one note, only occasionally funny and the even greater waste of talent is found in the brilliant Toni Collette (Hereditary) wasted as Yifa, Marshall's wife who's constantly pulling him aside to whisper instructions in his ear. To say Collette's role is underwritten is an understatement.
Mickey is so stupid that he signs up for the mission as an "expendable". He couldn't bother to read the fine print, so he's cloned again and again and again (which isn't nearly as interesting as the movie thinks it is) suffering all sorts of deaths.
It's a shockingly aimless screenplay by Ho, maybe unable to break free of the novel by Edward Ashton that the script is based on. Halfway through its two+ hours, I kept waiting for a Bong Joon Ho movie to break out.
It never does.
There are bright spots, including Naomi Ackie (Blink Twice) as Nasha, a security officer on the ship who falls in love with Mickey 17 in all his wide eyed, dopey innocence. She's in for a surprise when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 end up both living at the same time, thanks to a benevolent alien species.
The final hour spirals off into what I think Ho perceived as a jaw dropping, large scale, science fiction "spectacle" on the snowy surface of their new planet. Unfortunately, any true satire has been beat over our heads so many times by this point, it becomes a repetitive, predictable slog to the film's sappy ending that doesn't land.
Kudos to Pattinson for playing a wide variety of clones and many different versions of himself. He does his absolute best with what's given him, which isn't much.
A huge disappointment from a terrific writer/director, this one looks ready to tank hard at the box office this weekend. With a $118 million budget, Warner Bros. must already be crammed into every seat of a board room looking for a way to write this turkey off the books.
MICKEY 17, Audience 0 gets a C-.
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