Action sickos and Bong Joon-heads may now rejoice. After “Parasite” gave way to six long years of famine, the Oscar-winner has returned with a feast, serving up a sci-fi spectacle bursting with enough lofty ideas and buffoonish antics to keep even the hungriest fans sated — especially if the Korean auteur goes quiet for another half-decade.
Still, those looking for more of the sublime precision of “Parasite” – or “Mother” or “Memories of Murder,” for that matter – should hope that next project is back on home-turf, for “Mickey 17” only cements the clear divide between the filmmaker’s English- and Korean-language work. In ways both figurative and literal, “Mickey 17” finds Bong Joon-ho bugging out.
That the director adapted a novel originally titled “Mickey 7” should clue you in to the gusto and abundance at play here, while rumors of the studio’s apparent befuddlement become all the more ironic given the film’s proud affiliation with the Warner Bros. legacy. In so many ways, “Mickey 17” plays as a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, channeling all of Chuck Jones’ madcap fury into a live-action dystopia, with a dose of barely-veiled political satire thrown in for good measure.
Robert Pattinson plays all the Mickeys, beginning as an earthbound deadbeat who signs himself up for an experimental cloning program as a way to save his ass from a death warrant. Turns out the joke’s on him: Reading neither block letters nor fine print, Mickey Prime thus becomes an ‘Expandable’ – an interstellar canary-in-the-coalmine meant to test out the myriad ways to die in space. Every time one expires, a next version gets printed to vicariously croak anew, with the consciousness carried over from one generation to the next. Trouble arises when Mickey 18 emerges while 17 still breathes – a breach of protocol punishable by a death with no rebirth.
A teen-idol turned auteur-darling turned action-lead, Pattinson could easily call comedy his true calling, here delivering an elastic physical performance as dexterous as Jim Carrey in his prime. Playing off himself as two clones with wildly different temperaments – ‘mild Mickey’ and ‘habanero Mickey,’ as their now shared flame Nasha (Naomi Ackie) describes them – the actor has an innate feel for the dopey comic sensibility that his film-literate director might trace back to Jerry Lewis, and enough screen presence to easily delineate his two characters when both are seamlessly composed into the same shot.
In any other context, the actor’s galactically broad turn – contorting his body into a punctuation mark while delivering his lines with an accent cribbed from Steve Buscemi – might threaten to eclipse the very film; in “Mickey 17,” he instead anchors us, offsetting the even greater mania and barely-controlled chaos happening all around.
One might gasp for air simply listing the various spare-players and side-plots, among which include Steven Yeun as a drug-dealing rogue, and Anamaria Vartolomei (whose breakthrough film “Happening” was awarded the top prize in Venice by jury president… Bong Joon-ho) as a pansexual rival for the Mickeys’ affection. Suffice it say, all are contained to an off-world colony run by a pair of despotic charlatans whose similarity to America’s once and present first couple is no happy accident.
Fitted with horse-choppers and slurring his speech with the same diction Sebastian Stan put to good use in “The Apprentice,” Mark Ruffalo hams it up something fierce, evoking the current president for certain, while not quite doing a full imitation. Instead, Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall is a composite of all the disgraced politicians turned televangelists turned warmongers from all the world over – which doesn’t make his turn any easier to digest. As wife Ylfa, Toni Collette joins her screen-partner in ham, chewing her lines as a sauce-obsessed elite who sees space critters as the final frontier in gastronomic pursuits.
The director keeps all those plates spinning at a breakneck pace, staging “Mickey 17” as frenetic barrage of chases and set-pieces that let loose a pair of Pattinsons first on a space station and then upon a Hoth-like snowscape (“a pure white planet,” says Colette, leaving understatement back on earth) that is populated by indigenous slugs. Following “Okja” and “Snowpiercer” in tenor and tone, Bong once again explores questions of militarism and animal rights, building towards an inevitable collision between the two species.
Only, “Mickey 17” plays louder and looser than those previous, more streamlined efforts, threading an already cacophonous narrative with philosophical and existentialist asides while casting the Mickey as a kind of tragicomic modern Prometheus – he gets to lose hits guts, alright, but he never does touch glory. The film, in short, exhilarates and exhausts in equal measure, abundant in ambition and arduous, at points, in execution. And after six long years of waiting, one can hardly fault a bit of excess generosity – even if the feast leaves you stuffed if not quite satisfied.
“Mickey 17” will be released exclusively in theaters on March 7.