'Mickey 17' Is So Fine, 'Monkey' Shines, 'Andor' Takes Rare 'Star Wars' Victory Lap
Meanwhile, Netflix momentarily props up the best serial killer flick of recent years.
In today’s entirely run-of-the-mill newsletter…!
Review: Mickey 17 plays like a *very good* Bong Joon-ho mix tape. (free)
Trailer: Andor season 02 feels like the end of Disney’s try-hard era.
Box Office: Yes, $14 million for The Monkey is good enough.
Streaming: Netflix does a rare mitzvah as To Catch a Killer is now (briefly) popular.
FYI - Do be cool and join the paid subscriber chat tomorrow at 11 a.m. P.S.T.
Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is oh-so fine, even if it won’t blow your mind.
If I were to bend over backward, to be fair, I might argue that Captain America: Brave New World had the bad luck to be delayed from the summer of 2024 to last month. By the time it debuted, its “repentant old white politician isn’t beyond salvation, actually” narrative felt less like a tough love jab at Joe Biden than a Trump-era fascist apologetic. Conversely, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Mickey 17 has only benefited from its respective delays. Granted, nothing in terms of tone, politics or topicality will shock anyone who’s seen even a single (let alone more than one) Boon Joon-ho flick. Yet this – depending on who you ask – $80-$120 million outer-space sci-fi comedy arrives theatrically beginning this week (if you live in South Korea) before its March 7 domestic debut as what feels like the first “Trump 2.0” tentpole.
It’s a gleefully cynical and grim riff on corporatized government run by self-idealizing idiots who hide behind religion as they turn the working class into literal expendable widgets. Again, there is nothing to shock anyone with even a token awareness of Reagan-era Hollywood sci-fi flicks like They Live or Robocop. Yet it’s nice to see a big studio flick with at least as much political nerve as, I dunno, Stuart Gordon’s Fortress. If anything, the episodic and not entirely disciplined narrative sometimes plays like a greatest hits record for those well-versed in the Oscar-winning director’s filmography, going back to his first (also now ghoulishly topical) Barking Dogs Never Bite 25 years ago. Nitpicks aside, there are worse things than watching one of the greats dabble in many of his favorite themes and narrative tropes with a massive Hollywood budget on a comparatively large-scale canvas.
For those who missed the trailers, Mickey 17 (based, I cannot say how faithfully, on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7) stars Robert Pattinson as a luckless loser who signs up for an outer-space mission as a way to escape those who want to kill him over unpaid debts. The gimmick is that he’s signing up to be an expendable – he really should have read the paperwork – for which he will be cloned and sent on various suicide missions, after which the next version will be printed out and sent into harm’s way. Mickey Barnes now has to – say it with me now – live, die and repeat. All is “well” as Mickey has even found a romantic and sexual connection with Nasha Adjaya (Naomi Ackie) until a presumed demise turns out to be a mere close call, resulting in two Mickeys.
The reasons why having more than one version of a given person must result in both being killed is both arbitrary and irrelevant, which is also the case for much of the worldbuilding and significant plot details up to a point. The first two-thirds of the film essentially plays like an episodic “lazy river” movie, which primarily works since we’re in good company amid talented filmmakers. Pattinson again relishes the chance to do a goofy voice while playing a comparatively sheepish weirdo, and Ackie has fun as a refreshingly horny and R-rated love interest. Steven Yuen (Mickey’s work pal), Mark Ruffalo (the evil politician) and Toni Collette (the evil politician’s evil wife) fill out the core cast of a film that, for a while, seems mostly like an excuse to stage absurdist, yet thematically relevant, comic situations from its sci-fi high concept.
The eventual “problem to be solved” plays fair in terms of character arcs and narrative pay-offs, with the filmmaker again pulling off the balancing act between open-faced cynicism and full-blown nihilism. Beyond the broader themes and stellar production values (the money is on the screen), the picture mines quirky comedy from the mere notion that each version of Mickey differs from the last. The key first-act whoopsie thus results in a kind of Odd Couple-style farce and allows Pattinson to display subtly distinct choices. At its core, Mickey 17 is a relentlessly bleak black comedy that offers a frighteningly plausible future-tense endpoint while remaining “fun” and oddly escapist if only for its genre trappings. Speaking of which, the picture’s mix-and-match of its director’s previous cinematic triumphs plays as an acknowledgment that Boon Joon-ho has become a genre unto himself.