Mickey 17 (2025) – Review

Quick Thoughts: 

• Grade – B-  
• Naomi Ackie and Robert Pattinson are great
• It lacks momentum, which makes it feel overly long
• Don’t invest in macaroons
• I love the creatures
• It’s far from my favorite Bong Joon Ho film, but it’s still worth watching because an auteur was given a boatload of money and he allowed Robert Pattinson to base one of his characters after Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber.

Before I get into the review I want to applaud Warner Brothers for shelling out $118 million so Bong Joon Ho could make an expensive science fiction comedy that’s loaded with sex, violence, clones, misunderstood aliens and Mark Ruffalo’s gigantic fake teeth. I love when Bong goes sci-fi  (Snowpiercer, Okja, The Host) because the result is always interesting. I’m sad to say that Mickey 17 ranks behind his prior sci-fi efforts, but it’s still worth watching because an auteur was given a boatload of money and he was fine with his lead actor Robert Pattinson basing one of his characters after Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber. 

Based on Edward Ashton’s  2022 novel Mickey7, Mickey 17 is a lot – which is a good and bad thing. The film starts with Robert Pattinson’s titular character stuck in an ice cave and then goes back in time to explain why he left Earth (macaroon store debt) and became an “expendable” crew member on a spaceship headed to a colony that is far away from murderous debt collectors. After skimming through his employment contract, Mickey agrees to become an “Expendable,” which means he can be killed and brought back (with all of his memories) by a cloning system that is only legal in space. Because Mickey can be easily cloned, he is gassed, irradiated, chopped and used as a guinea pig to cure outbreaks. It’s a terrible existence that is made easier by the presence of his cool girlfriend Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), a security officer who isn’t afraid to put on a hazmat suit so she can sit with Mickey when he’s forced to die a slow death in a toxic gas chamber for research.

The leaders of the expedition are a religious nut job/failed politician (who dances like Donald Trump) named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), who plan on starting a “pure” colony on a near-uninhabitable ice planet that’s inhabited by “Creepers,” who look like a guinea pig, wooly mammoth, armadillo and a caterpillar smooshed together to create something new. Since Kenneth and Ylfa are horrible people, they plan on killing the creatures, so they task Mickey with catching one of the baby creepers so that it can be studied for weaknesses. Things get complicated when Mickey #17 supposedly dies during his mission in the ice caves (the creepers save him), and the scientists create Mickey #18. The additional clone is a problem because according to an intergalactic law created after a serial killer had copies of himself made, it’s illegal to have multiple clones. The punishment is permanently deleting the person(s) and all their memories – which both Mickey #17 and Mickey #18 don’t want to happen. What follows is a madcap finale that involves explosions, screaming creepers, and Toni Collette making sauce. 

As much as I love Ruffalo and Collette, their characters might be the weakest part of the film as they go so over-the-top that they feel like they’re in another movie. Bong has never shied away from class-based themes or hammering home his point, but they are so heavy-handed that they don’t register as humans. The biggest problem with the movie is that it’s so scattershot that it loses focus and the lack of focus makes the experience feel longer than it is. There isn’t much momentum and it very much feels like Bong went a little overboard and lost focus due to him having final cut and very little supervision. To be fair, Bong Joon Ho has earned this blank-check movie, and there’s a lot to like here, but it’s not as tight or propulsive as his other science fiction classics.