‘Mickey 17’ review: Bong Joon Ho’s latest skims along familiar currents

Movie review

“What’s it like … dying?”

Good question. And one the title character in “Mickey 17” is uniquely qualified to answer. Dying, you see, is what Mickey does for a living. 

It’s the future in the latest picture from filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, Oscar-winning director of “Parasite.” It’s a future in which life on Earth stinks and people are eager to depart the premises for the promise of a better existence in outer space. Count Mickey among that number.

He’s a well-meaning loser with few meaningful job prospects on Terra. So he signs up for what he hopes will be an off-planet career upgrade, and, well — Sigh! — one should really read the fine print before signing on the dotted line. 

The job title is “Expendable” and they mean it. In the future, 3D-printing technology is so advanced that people can be copied. Download brainwaves to the copy, and voilà! — a whole new self. Which, due to that pesky fine print, means the copy is then used for horrific, and invariably fatal, medical experiments.

Mickey is irradiated or infected with ghastly diseases while grinning scientific observers giddily take notes as blood is vomited and skin is seared. The lifeless husk is then chucked down an incinerator hole, and another copy is readied for further experimentation. And on and on and on. It’s immortality of a sort, and Mickey has been through the wringer 17 times already and is on the verge of an 18th go-round as the picture begins.

Bong blends humor and horror skillfully as Pattinson makes Mickey, dweeb though he is, a sympathetic sad sack. He’s resigned to his fates, delivering voice-over commentary on his doleful experience. Not liking the life (or lives) much but, hey, what can he do?

That’s when Mickey 18 enters the picture, via an accident. Also played by Pattinson, he’s full of attitude and peevishness over the fact that the rules call for 17 to be dead and 18 to take over and not be so passive.

Seeking also to infuse Mickey with something resembling a spine is a tough, confident woman named Nasha played by Naomi Ackie. Flawed though Mickey is, he has a functioning libido and he’s strongly attracted to Nasha and she, oddly, is to him. 

Entering the picture, too, is a bombastic, narcissistic third-rate politician with an elaborate, swirly hairstyle played by Mark Ruffalo, bearing a not accidental similarity to a certain prominent contemporary political figure. With his toxic Lady Macbethlike wife played by Toni Collette at his side, he raves about his cultish goal of establishing a society of pure white citizens with all other people — like, for instance, the Mickeys — having no value. 

Add in an alien race that look like hairy haystacks with giant, gaping, slavering maws that the odious couple want to hunt to extinction, and the picture’s alignment with current events is drawn tighter.

The blend of humor and social commentary along with the picture’s rough-hewed and distinctive look is somewhat reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

Bong covered many of the same aspects of “Mickey” in his 2013 sci-fi epic “Snowpiercer,” a more streamlined and hard-bitten work of social commentary with the have-nots battling the heedless rich. ”Mickey 17” is less focused and not quite as satisfying a production as that earlier movie.