Mucking With Movies: ‘Mickey 17’

Let me give you a little bit of behind the scenes.

Whenever I review a movie, I take notes on my phone. I turn it on airplane mode, turn the brightness way down, and try to separate myself from everybody, so the phone doesn’t ruin their time in the safe oasis that is a movie theater. One time, a millenial mom sneered at me after the flick was over. “Could you even enjoy the movie being on your phone the whole time?” Before I could answer, a grey-haired man overheard her and dropped a “Everybody’s got something to say” before moseying on his way. I loved that man, I think about him a lot. All this is to say that I lost my notes this week, so for the first time, here’s my review based entirely off memory. I’m pretty sure I saw “Mickey 17.”

With Bong Joon Ho’s burgeoning success in his home country of South Korea becoming so undeniable, his last feature “Parasite” was the first international film to win best picture at the Oscars. Warner Bros. showed Ho a bag of money and an opportunity to work with Robert Pattinson and asked him to direct a palatable American movie for English-speaking audiences. It would have been way, way cooler if he just made another South Korean flick that distributors opened nationwide in the States, but asking an American to read subtitles at the movies is considered something close to blasphemy. In fact, at this point in our nationalistic spiral, I’m afraid folks would take hearing a foreign language in the theater as something close to kicking a flag-clutching bald eagle. Making a quality film is an almost impossible endeavor when you grow up your audience’s zeitgeist; the degree of difficulty to pull this off is almost astronomical. And you know what? Ho almost pulls it off!

Who would have thought that the pale vampire dude from “Twilight” would go on to have one of the best acting careers of his generation? Some actors excel at playing themselves through the vessel of their characters. When Jack Nicholson plays the Joker, he’s Nicholson first and the Joker second. When Bill Murray played Hunter S. Thompson in “Where the Buffalo Roam,” it was not Murray as Thompson, it was Hunter S. Thompson as Murray. This is not a knock, by the way; everybody has their method to going about their art. But, I do love it when actors are chameleons, that wherever you plug them in, they are going to become one with the world their character lives inside of. Pattinson has that capability, and it is brilliantly on display once again in “Mickey 17.”

It’s something with the way Pattinson contorts his voice, balancing its buoyancy depending on the situations he finds himself in. The buoyancy always makes the scenes feel alive, but the tonal shifts effortlessly depending on what the scene demands. This skill lends itself to being particularly useful in “Mickey 17” as he plays several versions of himself, as he gets cloned again and again, so that he can be expended for the greater good. As the 18th version of Mickey, Pattinson dusts off his old Batman voice to be the heartthrob outlaw opposite 17’s squeamish dweeby dude. You can close your eyes and just listen to the two characters and know who is who and what they represent. 

It brings us back to the film’s main theme of “the greater good,” something I deeply, deeply do not believe in. If you compromise your morals every day, you will live a compromised life, even if it’s in pursuit of some convoluted big picture. There is no greater good; there is only the good you bring into your day-to-day life and minute-to-minute decision making. Mickey 18 understands my sentiment on the subject, disgusted at how 17 is so willing to accept his fate. But there is something beautiful about 17’s willingness to pledge himself to something greater than himself. Ho struggles to find a balance between the two, desperate to reconcile with the myoptism of one and the frank ugliness of the other. 

But, everything in “Mickey 17” just felt a little bit off. It was something adjacent to what would be a great movie. Mark Ruffalo’s performance as failed politician and populist Kenneth Marshall strikes that cord, where he had the base but did not know how to build on it. Directing is as simple and as complicated as knowing what you want and understanding how to achieve it. Ho knew what he wanted to do with “Mickey 17,” but I’m not sure if he knew how to get there this time. 

Critic Score: 6.2 out of 10