Mickey Send Me to the Past
It’s like dying all over again: just as Bong Joon Ho made his international breakthrough, winning three Oscars and one for South Korea for his Parasite, the global coronavirus pandemic put a halt to his career and everything else. Some sprung back quicker and leaner than others, like Claire Denis, Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino, Lena Dunham, and Pedro Almodóvar, who’ve all released two or three films since 2020. But like so many other Oscar mega-winners, Bong was put in an impossible position: a blank check, but one that would take a very long time to cash. Six years is WAY too long for a follow-up, I don’t care if you’re a director, a musician, or an author; unless “once a decade” is your set speed, gigantic gaps like that look tragic in a body of work (it’s an inexplicable loss that, for example, John Waters only made two movies in the 1980s, one at the beginning and one near the end).
But Mickey 17 was shot in 2022 and completed in November 2023. It shows, particularly at the end, which suggests a Kamala Harris coronation; but for most of the movie, Mark Ruffalo’s doing a very bad Trump meets Musk impression, playing a character who multiple people point out has “lost two elections.” Bong’s an openly political director, the idea that he’d mock Trump directly isn’t strange or even unexpected, but it’s the worst part of the movie, at least what sucks the air out of the theater. For the first hour or so, you’re with Robert Pattinson’s Mickey 17, the 17th clone in a series of experimental worker drones; the government puts him in dangerous situations, experiments on his body, and disregards his opinions and feelings—to them, he has none, he’s livestock, monkeys in a lipstick lab.
Great setup, and Pattinson’s bizarre cartoon accent—he sounds like the Roadrunner smacked out—is awesome, best part of the movie. It’s conventional Hollywood action/sci-fi, something that Paul Verhoeven might’ve done in the 1990s. It’s more well composed on a shot-by-shot basis than most American movies, big or small. The mellotron solo from Elliott Smith’s “Twilight” is used during a long dolly in shot on Mickey and… one of his girlfriends. Potential girlfriends? I can’t remember.
This movie has too many characters, too many short ends, scenes that go nowhere, and near the finale, Mickey himself sort of disappears, too. It’s all a mush, and immediately recognizable as the kind of bloated, bizarre failure that litters the work of most directors and musicians (it’s something that becomes more and more likely the longer it takes in between projects; once again, six years is too long). Bong and Warner Bros. allegedly “clashed” over the movie, despite Bong having final cut; dumping it in March, after moving it all over the 2025 schedule, is another sign that the studio didn’t believe in what they had. I don’t blame them: once Ruffalo shows up, OBVIOUSLY DOING A SPIN ON TRUMP, you could feel the energy change in the theater. Everyone I overheard walking out was unimpressed, bored, and annoyed. And they all loved the first hour, before Ruffalo, in, without question, the worst performance of his career.
Bong has another film ready to shoot. I’m sure it’ll be better than Mickey 17.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith