Mickey 17 - You Try to Explain What This Movie Is Really About

With today's cinema all about big brand IPs and sequels, I love movies that do something new and different. I love moves that try. It's truly rare for a studio to put money behind a project such as Mickey 17. I applaud Warner Bros. for the effort.

Too bad the effort failed. 

Lordy, it's been a while since I've seen a film that was so all over the place. The simple plot is this -  Mickey is a down-on-his-luck simp who signs up to be an expendable on a space expedition to colonize a planet. He is the lucky one who gets killed during dangerous missions and experiments and cloned in perpetuity.   

The first act is a blast as we see the world Mickey lives in. It's fun, it's creative, it's otherworldly. The second act sets up what seems to be three (or four?) separate storylines, and the third act completely throws the majority of those stories away to focus on the weakest story. 

Characters are introduced then not seen for thirty minutes or ever again.  It felt like they had three movies with three themes going on and spliced them together in the editing room.  You have a movie that seems to establish the loneliness of space, then a movie about individuality, then it's a movie about saving a species or something... You try to figure it out if there is an actual point.

What really destroys this film is Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette's characters. It's like they are in a completely different movie altogether.. It's a shame as these actors can do great work, but by the third act they have gone so far off the rails that they should have mustaches to twirl. 

In the end you have a movie that tries to do too much, and therefore doesn't quite work. It's interesting enough to get through, but you'll feel a 'what did I just watch' pit in your stomach when the credits roll. But... at least it tried.

A random stranger's opinion - Swing-and-a-miss from Bong Joon Ho, but it might be worth watching for Pattinson fans because he really puts out a lot of effort here trying to hold this thing together. 

Grade: C-