REVIEW: Mickey 17 (2025)

Movie Reviews

Mickey 17 is garbage. There’s no other… well, that’s not true; there are lots of words to describe it, but “garbage” is pretty succinct. It’s a comedy that isn’t funny, a character study that has no real characters, a thriller with no thrills, and a political commentary so on the nose it may as well have come with a Trump punching bag with every ticket purchased. It raises some potentially fascinating ideas, then does nothing with them, swapping out its main plot and theme halfway through for, as Monty Python would put it, something completely different. And it’s got a gaggle of awful performances by actors playing caricatures with the humor of those talentless comedians who seemingly demand you laugh at their inability to be funny.

In the future, a wealthy failed Presidential candidate (Mark Ruffalo) is spearheading the colonization of a distant planet called Niflheim (it’s an ice planet because GET IT!?). Desperate and on the run from a loan shark, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to be an “expendable,” meaning he agrees to do lethal work and be cloned each time he dies, with his memories and personality restored, effectively bringing him back to life. Each new version of Mickey is given a number to indicate how many times he’s been cloned. But when Mickey 17 is left for dead on Niflheim and manages to get out alive, he’s got to contend with his replacement – and the lurking horror that if he’s discovered, he’ll be destroyed.

That sounds like a thematically rich sci-fi plot, doesn’t it? What does it mean to exist? If someone is cloned, which version of him is the real him? Are any of them really him? Are they even human? How do the people who love him feel about him and the other clone? Is it ethical to clone someone? Is it ethical not to, given the benefits for society and the notion of keeping someone alive past death, if, in fact, they are still alive? Where does religion fall on this issue? A lot of these ideas are raised, but they’re all either quickly abandoned or given the dumbest possible explanation. Mickey 17 should be an exceedingly human movie, but it’s devoid of humanity, never wanting to see anyone as a person with a point of view or a desire that makes sense for them. Everything devolves into a joke or a political screed, and Mickey 17 never says anything about its characters or the nature of humanity until it tries to trick us into thinking it is.

All of this can be seen through the main character, the titular Mickey 17. This new version of Mickey Barnes is the narrator, and he informs us about the past Mickeys while extensive flashbacks show us how Mickey got to where he is. And Mickey is a moron; the way he got himself into trouble with the mob is beyond stupid, and his signing up to be an expendable feels not so much like the actions of a desperate man but the acquiescence of a timid loser. And he doesn’t change; Mickey 17 tells us that each clone has a different personality, but every one we see is exactly the same, with the same stupid voice (what the hell was Pattinson thinking with this?) and the same dopey, shy, weak-willed persona. This is the movie trying to convince the viewer that it’s smarter than it is, that it’s got something to say when it doesn’t. Meanwhile, the idea that each Mickey is a new Mickey falls flat because they’re all clearly the same guy, and he’s a dull, passive, grating protagonist.

The one exception is Mickey 18, the clone made when everyone thinks Mickey 17 is dead. Mickey 18 does have a different personality – and a different voice, thank God – and the explanation for this is not only dumb but contradicts the earlier idea that they all have different characteristics. (It also proves not to be true, at least in practice, so I don’t know what the point of including it was in the first place.) Micky 18 should have been the protagonist; he’s much more interesting than Mickey 17, and he gives Pattinson a lot more to work with than stumbling over himself and making goofy faces. But no, he’s a relatively minor character while Mickey 17 takes center stage – as much as you can call bumbling around and shivering while everyone around you moves the plot forward “taking the stage.” They could have at least given Mickey 17 an arc where he rises to the occasion, but they’re content letting him drift through the mess of a plot, never changing, never doing anything, and constantly boring us.

And that plot is such a mess that it becomes a series of things happening rather than characters making decisions. Even the few times they do resolve to do something, they either don’t do it or circumstances prevent them from doing it. Worse still (maybe; I’m not sure which is worse), the plot transforms halfway through, and while I won’t give it away, I will say that it has nothing to do with clones outside of involving Mickey 17. Why is it so jumbled and confused? Because the clear point of this movie was not to examine what makes us human or anything related to the second plot that eventually takes over but to rage against Hollywood’s least favorite political personality. Mickey 17 is primarily about how evil Donald Trump is, and this isn’t a situation where you can read that into it if you look really hard; there is no escaping that Mark Ruffalo’s villain is supposed to be Trump – or, at least, the image of Trump people like this have created for themselves. From his devoted supporters who wear red hats and shirts (and are, of course, portrayed as dumb rubes) to his white supremacism (I’m dead serious when I say this: he picks the ice planet because it’s white) to his pursed lips similar to Alec Baldwin’s SNL impersonation to his referring to a large stone as a “big, beautiful rock” to even having him do the Trump “YMCA” dance (not to the actual song, thankfully) to Ruffalo’s atrocious performance, which is a two-hour lampoon of someone who drives the actor nuts, there is no way of hiding this one, and I don’t think writer-director Bong Joon Ho even wants to. This is the point I’m constantly making about activism and how it kills art: when creators set out to make a political point, the art of is no concern to them. That’s how you get trainwrecks like Mickey 17.

There are no real high points to Mickey 17. The performances are terrible across the board, with the exception of Pattinson as Mickey 18, but it’s not like any of the actors could have done much with this trash. (I felt terrible for the usually excellent Toni Collette while watching it; she tries so hard to make her character work.) The special effects are okay, sometimes pretty good and sometimes awful, with that same rubbery look that permeates the recent Marvel movies. There are two – or maybe three, depending on how you view some of this – romantic plotlines, none of which are resolved in any meaningful way, nor are they set up particularly well. Naomie Ackie’s Nasha loves Mickey because she laughed maniacally at him in the lunchroom one day; that’s the most the film gets into the specifics of romance, and hers is the stronger one. Characters come up with plans to get themselves out of predicaments, but nothing happens, and they’re never mentioned again. People do stupid things because everyone is stupid. No one sees or hears conversations that happen right in front of them. And it goes on seemingly forever, with the dull-as-dishwater climax taking a good fifteen minutes more than it should have to wrap up, followed by a completely pointless extended epilogue. Mickey 17 is a waste of your time.

Let us know what you thought of Mickey 17 in the comments!

***

Get a META PC today; use code “199” to save on all purchases!

If you want to know what kind of political leanings movies have or just talk about cinema, check out the movie ratings community Criticless.

Get Your Geeks + Gamers merch here!