Robert Pattinson as Mickey 18 and Robert Pattinson as Mickey 17 in a scene from "Mickey 17." (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
The dust has settled on a chaotic and tumultuous awards season, and not a moment too soon. Oscar night came and went with few surprises and no major shakeups. Me? Almost all of my 2024 favorites were shut out, so I didn't bother taking the night off work and opted to catch the pleasantly retro yet rather stale ceremony after the fact.
Can't say I was a fan of “Anora,” the night's big winner, but I was happy for “I'm Still Here,” Brazil's solid International Feature entry, which beat Jacques Audiard's tone-deaf “Emilia Pérez” and showed that sometimes good triumphs over evil. Most of all, I'm grateful for the night's true Cinderella story: the independently produced Latvian film “Flow,” which won Best Animated Feature and prevailed over its bigger U.S. and U.K. counterparts.
But that's enough Oscar chatter. As we eagerly await the end of winter and get ready to spring forward, it's time for us movie buffs to turn the page on an imperfectly passable movie year and sit back with a popcorn movie or two at your local multiplex. A pair of them try to stand out from the pack, not only because they tout their throwback pleasures up front and center, but because they're the product of filmmakers who march to the beat of their own drum. One of these directors is an Oscar-winning South Korean auteur releasing his first film in nearly six years, and the other is a mayhem purveyor from the U.S. of A with horror in his DNA and who got his start in showbiz on the other side of the camera. Let's dig in.
Naomi Ackie as Nasha Barridge and Robert Pattinson as Mickey 17 in a scene from "Mickey 17." (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
“Mickey 17”: The latest foray into science-fiction from Bong Joon-ho may be the “Parasite” director's most mainstream venture to date, but this caustic exploration of the ethics of space travel, as well as the Pandora's box that cloning might become for humanity in the not-too-distant future, retains the brusque charm and cheeky jabs at authority from his earlier work. It doesn't all click, but this is clearly the work of someone who gives a damn, about his characters and about making sure a story about cloning doesn't itself become a carbon copy of other films on the trendy subject.
Adapted from Ashton Edwards' 2022 novel “Mickey7,” “Mickey 17” is narrated by its titular character, a “reprinted” iteration of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson). The chronic loser runs afoul of a loan shark after he and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) borrow money for a macaron business that goes belly up. With things looking dicey on Earth, the two men pin their hopes on joining the crew of a space ship that aims to colonize the planet Niflheim, not knowing if it's even inhabitable.
But while the duplicitous, untrustworthy Timo secures a pilot position, Mickey applies on impulse to be an “Expendable,” meaning he signs away his body to be used as a guinea pig for the most dangerous endeavors. Cannon fodder. Meat for the grinder. He unwittingly agrees to have a new version of himself, with his memories carried over, 3-D printed every time he kicks the bucket, with the proviso that there can never be more than one of him, or a “Multiple” at the same time.
Mark Ruffalo as Kenneth Marshall and Toni Collette as Ylfa in a scene from "Mickey 17." (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
Bong dovetails a montage of the grisly fates each Mickey meets with a romance that develops between the protagonist(s) and Nasha (“Blink Twice's” Naomi Ackie), a security agent on the ship. The mission is the brainchild of Kenneth Marshall (a game Mark Ruffalo), a MAGA-lomaniacal politician with a God complex and a set of grotesquely perfect pearly whites, perennially flanked by Ylfa (Toni Collette), his scheming, equally cartoonish life partner.
Once the ship arrives at Niflheim, these brave/foolhardy humans discover it's an icebox inhabited by furry critters they christen “creepers.” Following a series of unfortunate events and a brush with danger, Mickey 17 returns to the ship, only to discover his next version in bed. Whoa, what now? Those familiar with Bong's Darwinian narratives might expect this satire to become more ruthless at this juncture. But that's not quite what goes down in “Mickey 17,” which dials down the anything-goes tension of his previous work. The result is a playful Frankenstein's monster, an amiable fusion of “Okja” and “Snowpiercer,” Bong's other English-language sci-fi efforts, that's goofier and (dare I say it?) a little kinder.
Speaking of goofy, Pattinson has a blast playing the central calamity magnet and his Xeroxes. Settling for a wimpy voice and a shy demeanor as Mickey 17, the performance showcases the “Twilight” and “Good Time” star at his most confident and loose-limbed. Bong tends to encourage his actors to make bold choices and lean on caricature. The gambit pays off with Pattinson, and Yeun's Timo makes a fun, hissable frenemy.
Less successful are this colony's first couple. Ruffalo, whose over-the-top despot with a religious bent has echoes of Jeff Bezos, Robert Kennedy Jr. and our current commander in chief, is easier to take than a mannered Collette, whose broad-strokes approach to playing Ylfa rings hollow. Thankfully, their screen time is fairly limited.
Christian Convery as Young Hal in a scene from "The Monkey." (Photo courtesy of NEON.)
“Mickey 17” has had a bumpy journey from inception to release, with Warner Bros. postponing its release multiple times, and it's not hard to see why. The film is a feature-length middle finger to corrupt leadership and those who exploit the masses to achieve their own selfish ends, something that doesn't exactly scream “commercial cash cow” and may have also left a sour taste in the mouths of the corporate suits who greenlit this project. It's unclear at this point whether the studio has this film's best interests at heart.
But let's do our best to avoid giving those who may or may not be rooting for “Mickey 17” to stumble at the box office the satisfaction. In a time of groupthink and mind-numbing streaming content, here's a genre undertaking that's defiantly idiosyncratic. Yes, it's messy and overlong, but while it lacks the transgressive sting of Bong's best work, it suffuses the filmmaker's takedown of Christian nationalism and MAGA mentality with palpable empathy and a curiosity for interplanetary bridge-building. A valuable asset here is a classical, piano-driven score by “Squid Game” composer Jung Jae-il, an inspired departure from the synth chords and electric beeps one tends to hear in so many other films and longform TV depicting the future. It helps this rather overstuffed but disarming movie find a groove that's all its own.
“The Monkey”: It's a fool's errand to have high hopes for a big screen adaptation of one of Stephen King's full-on horror tales, as opposed to his less unhinged works with crossover appeal. (Think “Misery” and “Stand by Me.”) The track record does not inspire confidence. Over the 49 years since “Carrie,” Brian De Palma's sensational celluloid incarnation of King's best-seller about a shy high-schooler with unholy parentage, first came out in theaters, the bad movies made from the prolific author's books have outnumbered the good.
Theo James as Hal in a scene from "The Monkey." (Photo courtesy of NEON.)
So it comes as no surprise that “The Monkey” is a mixed bag, an uneven mishmash of gallows laughs and intergenerational angst predominantly set, as many of King's works have, in Maine. In the King page-to-screen spectrum, it falls somewhere in the middle. However, this lurid, bloodthirsty campfire tale has found in writer-director Osgood Perkins a most compatible fix.
The story kicks into gear when the two identical Shelburn twins, shy wallflower Hal and standoffish jerk Bill (Christian Convery, very good), discover the titular wind-up contraption (call it a toy at your peril) in a closet filled with things belonging to their father Petey (Adam Scott in an all-too-brief cameo), after he walked out on their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) circa 1999. What follows over roughly the next 20 minutes is a succession of gruesome freak accidents that come every time the monkey is wound up and allowed to bang its drum. A rather tasty dispatching, for instance, happens in the middle of a Benihana-style Japanese restaurant.
Yes, this “Monkey” is a one-trick pony, but the trick never gets old. What holds back this amusing bloodbath is Perkins' decision to go digital with the carnage. It might have had to do with the film's modest $10 million budget, but I can't help thinking how much more kick-ass some of these scenes would have been if they had relied more on practical effects.
A malevolent wind-up monkey in a scene from "The Monkey." (Photo courtesy of NEON.)
But this isn't the film's biggest hurdle. Tragedy strikes, and keeps on striking, and then the film jumps forward to present day. Hal, and later Bill, are now played by Theo James, and it's a dealbreaker. The “Divergent” and “The White Lotus” star gives it the old college try playing the main character as an adult, but giving him the role makes about as much sense as casting Channing Tatum to play Edward Scissorhands. He takes the winds out of “The Monkey's” sails.
That's a bummer, because Perkins nails King's impish, diabolical sensibility to a tee, then inserts some of his own twisted, pitch-black humor into the mix while never undermining the severity of the trauma that these estranged brothers have experienced. Perkins, the son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, has something to say about MIA dads and the sons who pay the price for their absence, which is also reflected in the way grown-up Hal has kept his own son, also named Petey (“Wonka's” Colin O'Brien), at arm's length.
But in trying to strike a balance between dark comedy and the film's portrayal of family dysfunction that reverberates through three generations, Perkins loses the thread somewhere along the way. For the filmmaker, who appears on screen briefly as the twins' deadbeat uncle, it's a decisive step up from “Longlegs,” last year's ambitious but terminally silly marriage of FBI procedural and occult lore. Alas, he lets the movie get away from him. Again. And that's a shame. Annie Wilkes would grimace at this near miss and call it cockadoodle.
“Mickey 17” is now playing in wide release across South Florida, including IMAX engagements at Regal South Beach, AMC Aventura 24, AMC Sunset Place 24 and the AutoNation IMAX at the Museum of Discovery and Science in downtown Fort Lauderdale. “The Monkey” is also playing in wide release, including at Regal South Beach, O Cinema, CMX Brickell City Centre and the Nite Owl Drive-in.
