‘Mickey 17’ Review: This Job Is Killing Him

In Bong Joon Ho’s latest dystopian romp, Robert Pattinson plays a hapless underdog whose work aboard a spaceship requires him to die, over and over.

The world is at once scarily familiar and thoroughly, enjoyably loony tunes in “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho freakout. Bong is the South Korean filmmaker best known for “Parasite,” a ferocious 2019 comedy about class relations that spares no one, including viewers whose laughs eventually turn into gasps of visceral horror. Few filmmakers can shift moods and tones as smoothly as Bong, or have such a commensurately supple way with genre. You never know what to expect in one of his movies other than the unexpected, although it’s a good guess that, at one point, something monstrous will show up.

Opening in 2054, “Mickey 17” takes place in an uneasily recognizable future that holds a cracked mirror to the present. It’s a very funny yet utterly serious story about ostensible winners and losers and about how, when money-grubbing push comes to power-hungry shove, heroes have it tough. That is the case with the title schlimazel, Mickey, a guy with a confused smile and a kick-me sign on his back. Played with soulful haplessness by Robert Pattinson, Mickey is a nice, not especially sharp guy who, having signed up with a space expedition, is in the wrong place at the wrong time for foolish reasons. He’s to blame, sort of.

Bong wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel “Mickey7.” The science in the movie is fairly minimal as such futuristic stories go; it includes a souped-up printer that Mickey becomes intimately familiar with during his wiggy adventures in inner and outer space. Following a disastrous business venture, he and his feckless friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), have fled Earth to work on a spaceship run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a congressman turned megalomaniacal cult leader whose acolytes like red hats. Marshall and his wife, a scary slinkstress, Ylfa (Toni Collette), plan on colonizing what he believes is an uninhabited new world, a snowy white “planet of purity.”

By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. As with any software update, there are bugs, along with routine mishaps. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?

It’s a question that others on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the melancholia that hangs over this movie even during its bounciest, most carnivalesque moments. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha (a lovely Naomi Ackie), a security agent who becomes his protector, an affair that heats up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.

And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but the one you come to know best is No. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.