Preternaturally gifted Korean writer/director Bong Joon Ho, now regularly working in English, has a great story to work with here . . . if only he’d stick with it. Starting in classic fashion, a pair of lowlifes (Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun) go on the run from murderous loan sharks, getting out of town (make that out of the solar system) by grabbing the first interplanetary flight opportunity colonizing a frozen planet. Yeun’s got a connection while Pattinson signs up to be a human guinea pig, an ‘Expendable,’ placing himself in harm’s way to test the waters (literally), experimental meds, air quality, local critters, and, should he die, getting ‘reprinted’ (DNA, memories and all) via 3-D techniques; a freshly made perfect copy, ready to die again. But a problem arises when he’s left for dead, but recovers to return to the space station on his new planet after a replacement Mickey (that’d be Mickey 18) has already been cloned & printed. Yikes! Endless possibilities here for moral & physical doppelgänger dilemmas: farce² or metaphysical morals & mortality.* But the film is stopped in its tracks by a cast playing so broadly, the gags stick in their throats; and with Pattinson also putting on a ‘funny’ voice. (Dennis Weaver from GUNSMOKE?) While Mark Ruffalo, the pseudo-religious visionary villain trying to start a brave new world tilts Trumpian. But an even bigger problem finds Bong Joon Ho moving past endemic complications for overworked anti-colonizing allegory with an Earthling crew cleansing ‘their’ planet of its indigenous population of ‘monsters’ who turn out to be nice enough ‘roly-poly’ beasts when respected/left alone, only acting like interstellar Comanche warriors when attacked by the likes of . . . us.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Both AVATARs/’09; ‘22 work the same colonizers vs indigenous storyline. But give MICKEY credit for more jokes and an hour’s less running time.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *You’ve no doubt noted how the prologue mirrors Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT/’59 while that extra Mickey gumming up the works pulls from Dumas’s twin princes in THE IRON MASK/’29, usually done as a romantic swashbuckler. (In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio played it.)
