So you think YOUR job is bad?
Sorry if we seem to be lacking empathy here. But however crummy you think your 9-5 routine is, it’ll never be as bad as Robert Pattinson’s in Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” — nor will any job, on Earth or any planet, approach this level of misery.
Mickey, you see, is an “Expendable,” and by this we don’t mean he’s a cast member in yet another sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s tired band of mercenaries (“Expend17ables”?). No, even worse! He’s literally expendable, in that his job description requires that he die, over and over, in the worst possible ways, only to be “reprinted” once again as the next Mickey.
And from here stems the good news, besides the excellent Pattinson, whom we hope got hazard pay, about Bong’s hotly anticipated follow-up to “Parasite.” There’s creativity to spare, and much of it surrounds the ways he finds for his lead character to expire — again and again.
The bad news, besides, well, all the death, is that much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess. In so many ways, the always inventive Bong just doesn’t know where to stop. It hardly seems a surprise that the sci-fi novel, by Edward Ashton, he’s adapting here is called “Mickey7” — Bong decided to add 10 more Mickeys.
The first act, though, is crackling. We begin with Mickey lying alone at the bottom of a crevasse, having barely survived a fall. It is the year 2058, and he’s part of a colonizing expedition from Earth to a far-off planet. He’s surely about to die. In fact, the outcome is so expected that his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), staring down the crevasse, asks casually: “Haven’t you died yet?”
How did Mickey get here? We flash back to Earth, where Mickey and Timo ran afoul of a villainous loan shark. This man likes to dine while watching his goons torture delinquent borrowers. Needless to say, the two young men need to escape — and far.
So they join the expedition to planet Nilfheim. Filling out his job application, Mickey, a hapless chap with an American grifter accent apparently subconsciously inspired by Steve Buscemi in “Fargo,” fails to read the fine print. He’s distracted by the smell of a woman’s hair.
It’s rather a shock, then, when he learns what he signed up for. During the four-plus year journey, he’ll be a human guinea pig, subjected to countless fatal indignities. Sending him out to absorb cosmic radiation, they ask Mickey to track the moment his skin burns and the moment he becomes blind. When his hand falls off and floats by the ship’s windows, nobody takes notice.
That’s because a human “printer” awaits — looking a lot like an MRI machine — ready to reprint him, with memory backup. Human printing has been banned on Earth, but is legal in space, where there is also, unfortunately, no worker’s comp.
Things are bleak on the ship. Food is rationed severely. Sex takes up too many calories, so it is banned, by none other than Kenneth Marshall, the wealthy, pompous, thin-skinned leader of the expedition (Mark Ruffalo) and his unpleasantly perky wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). This is inconvenient for Mickey, whose shipboard life is made bearable only by Nasha (Naomi Ackie), his brave and loving girlfriend, but they seem to get it on nonetheless, between Mickey’s deaths and new lives.
Marshall’s supporters wear red baseball caps, which gives you a pretty good hint as to which real-life leader Ruffalo, and Bong, are trying to evoke here. Current political references aside, Ruffalo relies mainly on an eccentric facial tic, and it must be said that both he and Collette grow more buffoonish, and hence more tiresome, as time goes on.
But Pattinson’s Mickey is the life (um, lives) we care about. By the time he falls into a crevasse and meets up with some presumably terrifying but also cute native animals — creepers, they’re called — sure to eat him alive, he is Mickey 17. But somehow, he miraculously survives. And things really get complicated when he gets back to the ship and meets — what? — Mickey 18. Oh no! Suddenly he’s not only an Expendable, he’s a Multiple. This is bad news.
Pattinson does double duty in the now-dual role, with one Mickey much more violent and nasty than the other as the two fight for survival. It’s his movie, and he saves it from Bong’s tendencies to overstuff the proceedings. In an extremely physical, committed, even exhausting performance, Pattinson takes what could have been an unwieldy mess and makes it much less, well, expendable.
Hopefully he’s recovering well.
“Mickey 17,” a Warner Bros. release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material.” Running time: 139 minutes. Two stars out of four.
