Mikey 17
From the first slapstick crash of Mickey 17, I wasn’t hooked — I was bracing for impact. Robert Pattinson’s Mickey hits the ground, and the movie never quite gets back on its feet. The jokes fumble, the tone stumbles, and what should be a slick, darkly comic opener lands with all the energy of a deflated airlock. It’s a start that promises speed but delivers awkwardness — a feeling that never quite lets go for the rest of the ride.
Let me be clear: I got my fill from Mickey 17. Robert Pattinson is phenomenal — a cocktail of sorrow, fear, anger, and apathy, garnished with the mannerisms of Jackass’s Steve-O. He’s giving everything he’s got, dragging the film’s emotional core to the surface and carrying it on his back. The movie itself isn’t afraid to get weird, and it brushes against something deeper, a meditation on life, death, and the spiritual toll of working-class exploitation. Bong Joon-ho pulls from his greatest hits — Snowpiercer’s class struggle, Okja’s corporate cruelty, Parasite’s commentary on wealth and power — but this time, it never quite hits the same nerve. The ideas are there; the impact isn’t. It’s not meaningless, just... flat. Like a speech that says all the right words but never raises your pulse.
The humor is mostly dead on arrival. Pattinson salvages some laughs, but the rest of the cast struggles. Mark Ruffalo, playing a televangelist-meets-Trump cult leader, leans into cartoonish villainy without much nuance, and Toni Collette, though giving it her all, is trapped in a role that teeters between satire and caricature. The film also leans hard on expository narration—presumably a holdover from the novel—but instead of enriching the story, it bogs it down, stopping characters in their tracks rather than propelling them forward.
And here’s the part that bothers me more than it should… (slight spoilers ahead): This world has cracked immortality. That should be earth-shattering — a fundamental shift in what it means to be human. Instead, the film breezes past it, using the conflict between Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 as a punchline rather than a gateway to deeper existential stakes. There’s a better movie buried in this premise, one that digs into identity, consciousness, and the weight of infinite existence. Mickey 17 flirts with those ideas, and sometimes it even lands, but when it doesn’t, the film drags — hard. The result is a muddled message, leaving the movie feeling more scattered than profound or relevant.
By the time the film stumbled to its emotional finale, I was charmed by its characters but left with an overriding emptiness. The runtime doesn’t justify itself, and by the last action-driven set piece, I wasn’t exhilarated—I was just ready for it to wrap up. There’s plenty to enjoy, plenty of twists and turns to keep it engaging, but with Bong Joon-ho at the helm and a cast this stacked, I can’t shake the feeling that Mickey 17 should’ve been more.