Producers: Danny A. Abeckaser, Kyle Stefanski and Gustavo Nascimento   Director: Danny A. Abeckaser   Screenplay: Kosta Kondilopoulos   Cast: David Arquette, Jeremy Luke, Danny A. Abeckaser, Bo Dietl, Joseph Russo, Graham Sibley, Nathaniel Buzolic, Deborah Geffner, Lynn Adrianna Freedman and Kevin Connolly   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: D

Though it’s based on a true story of corruption in the New York City police department (related in a 2006 book by Greg B. Smith, here adapted by Kosta Kondilopoulos), Danny A. Abeckaser’s “Mob Cops” is so riddled with heavy-handed stereotyping and terrible dialogue that it often comes across like a parody of the genre exemplified at its best in “The Sopranos” and the films of Martin Scorsese.  But the over-the-top treatment doesn’t appear to be intentionally funny; it’s just absurdly serious.

The most egregious example of the approach is in the ultra-hammy performance of Jeremy Luke as Leo Benetti, one of two NYC detectives who effectively become paid hit-men for a Mafia honcho (Bo Dietl); the other is Sammy Canzano (David Arquette), who doggedly puts up with the recklessness and ranting of his partner.  (The cops’ actual names were Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa; the names of other characters are altered as well.)

The pair’s nefarious activities have been going on for a long while when straight-arrow cop Tim Delgado (producer-director Danny A. Abeckaser) is asked by a family friend (Deborah Geffner) to look into the disappearance of her son, who was involved in bad stuff but, she argues, didn’t deserve to be rubbed out.  Tim and his partner (Nathaniel Buzolic) doggedly investigate, uncovering lots of tidbits about Canzano and Benetti, but it’s not until they interview incarcerated mob boss Galiano (Joseph Russo), who happily talks about his own biggest hits, that they get a line on all the bloody business the dirty cops have been involved in, and profited from.  Lots of flashbacks, and restroom breaks, punctuate his monologues.  

Still it’s not enough to get their boss (Kevin Connolly, in what amounts to a cameo) to authorize an arrest until Benetti writes a book about his exploits and is stupid enough to wax eloquent to a purported Hollywood producer in the hope of securing a movie deal.  That finally induces the boss to act.             

Apart from Russo’s extended riffs, it’s Luke who dominates the movie by sheer wacky bravado; by contrast Arquette spends most of his time trying to appear pained at his partner’s excesses—Benetti always seems on the verge of an apoplectic seizure—but he just winds up looking mildly constipated.  No one else makes much of an impression, especially Abeckaser, who’s as bland as they come.  If one’s being kind, one might speculate that he was too busy with other duties, like scraping together a budget, to devote much effort to his performance.  But he might have asked Kondilopoulos to tone down the script’s endless stream of “gritty” profanity and smooth out the action, which has a tendency to jump around chronologically and insert extraneous material—like brief scenes of the principals with their wives—that must have driven editor Steve Ansell up the wall.  At least his jerky, ragged work suggests that was the case.

But then, this looks as though it was a catch-as-catch can production, using actual New York locations (probably without official permission), which also would explain why the sets, costumes, and Barry Markowitz’s camerawork emphasize darkness and grit over clarity, though there are moments (restaurant interiors, a few kill sequences) that aim for some style; the outdoor scenes at the car lot where Benetti winds up working, by contrast, are so bright they’re barely watchable.  Ansell has trimmed the footage down to less than ninety minutes, though, which has to be counted as a blessing.  Lionel Cohen’s score barely registers.

There are times when a movie’s scrappiness turns out to be a virtue, forcing filmmakers to overcome the limitations imposed by their meager resources with sheer imagination.  This isn’t one of them: “Mob Cops” is cheap, looks it and plays like it.  If one could never term it a guilty pleasure, however, it does at least afford one the opportunity to laugh over Luke’s attempt at a performance of Falstaffian proportions.  But most viewers will think that an insufficient return for their time, and conclude that in this case you’d reach the proper description of the movie by removing the initial letter from “scrappy.”

Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi  Director: Bong Joon Ho   Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho   Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Anamaria Vartolomei, Daniel Henshall, Cameron Britton, Patsy Ferran, Michael Monroe, Tim Key, Lloyd Hutchinson, Stephen Park, Angus Imrie, Ian Hanmore, Ellen Robertson and Haydn Gwynne   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: D

For those who’d like to see Robert Pattinson killed on screen—Edward Cullen haters, you know who you are—Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Parasite” will be a joy: he dies over and over in very unpleasant ways. And suffers woefully in the process.  The movie dies too, with agonizing slowness.  Ponderous and pretentious, “Mickey 17” is a dull, insufferably smug sci-fi parable about class division, colonialism, political cultism, cloning, speciocide and religious mania, all in one package.  It’s also supposed to be funny.    

Based on the 2022 novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton but adding to the number of iterations in the existence of Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, the plot is set in a dystopian future when great masses are attempting to flee earth for other planets.  Among them are two hapless guys, sad-sack, dim-bulb Mickey and his smarter but shifty pal Timo (Steven Yeun), who are in debt to Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore), a murderous loan shark.  Both manage to get spots on a spacecraft headed for Niflheim, where failed politician and quasi-religious cult leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his shrewish, manipulative wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) intend to establish a colony befitting their ideas of purity and self-glorification—and the dominance of a privileged elite over the hoodwinked masses.  Timo lies about his expertise to secure a cushy job as a pilot, but Mickey is not so lucky.  Signing the application without bothering to read it, he volunteers to be an Expendable, not understanding what that entails.  He’s gleefully accepted.

That’s because the Expendable is the guy who must accept every dangerous assignment, from being tested with potentially fatal concoctions formulated by the science team headed by Dr. Arkady (Cameron Britton) to undertaking every probably lethal task.  If he dies, it’s fine, because he can be “reprinted” by a machine from waste matter, the duplicate then implanted with his electronically stored bank of memories.  (The procedure is forbidden on earth, but Marshall had secured dispensation for him to use it in space.)  By the time the plot kicks in four years after liftoff, Mickey’s in his seventeenth version, which seems about to end since he’s fallen into a deep crevice on icebound Niflheim and Timo, passing by, notes that it would be a waste of his time to attempt a rescue.

But he survives unexpectedly when a band of slug-like critters the humans call Creepers drag him off and, rather than devouring him, spit him out on the tundra.  Annoyed by being dismissed as unfit to consume, he makes his way back to the compound, where for some reason the beautiful—and formidable—Nasha (Naomi Ackie) has chosen the schmo as her preferred squeeze.  But to his distress he finds that since he was presumed deceased, a Mickey 18 has been created to replace him.  And presumably because an inept lab assistant had stumblingly unplugged the regenerator in mid-process, Mickey 18 emerged with a more aggressive, indeed rebellious personality.

What follows is a turgid farrago in which the two Mickeys vie both for survival—since “multiples,” as they’re called, are viewed as an abomination subject to immediate (and permanent) execution, which explains why Mickey 18 wants to off his inconvenient predecessor—and for Nasha.  There’s a further complication in Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), the death of whose girlfriend (Ellen Robertson) Mickey 17 had inadvertently caused. She’s now looking for either revenge or a new source of sexual satisfaction.

All of this is lumped into the larger plot of Marshall’s megalomaniacal ambitions, which, under the influence of Ylfa and his religious advisor Preston (Daniel Henshall)—who must not be confused with his spokesman (Tim Key), the fellow dressed for some reason in a pigeon costume—come to center on the genocidal extermination of the Creepers, a species that turns out to be far from the unintelligent bugs they’re assumed to be, and incredibly numerous.  The big finale combines crazy Ken’s campaign against them with the imminent execution of the two Mickeys, as well as a baby Creeper and  their defender Nasha. 

The cast commits to all Bong’s preachy nonsense with a zeal it hardly merits.  Pattinson comes off best; he differentiates ably between Mickey 17, who’s like a wimpy silent screen comic except for the fact that he emits a whiny, strangulated voice, and Mickey 18, who’s sneeringly pugnacious.  But it’s hardly a dual role that calls for any subtlety, and he provides none.  Neither does Yeun, who’s as blatantly sleazy here as he was sympathetic in “Minari.”  Ackie more than adequately embodies Nasha’s forceful self-confidence, the very opposite of Mickey 17’s mousiness. 

The nadir of the acting certainly comes in the performances of Swinton and Ruffalo.  She mugs as ferociously as she’s ever done—which is saying quite a lot.  But he outdoes himself.  Wearing false front teeth that push his upper lip out in a fashion that makes you fear he might bite his tongue off shouting Marshall’s maniacal lines, he’s bad enough in the first two acts, when he sports a fluffy hairdo.  But when in the third he slicks back the locks and, jutting out his chin, looks like a grotesque version of Marlon Brando, he goes beyond bad to unmentionable.  It’s a turn worthy of Razzie consideration.

“Mickey 17” is a fairly expensive film, but apart from the Creeper effects from the VFX team supervised by Dan Glass, it doesn’t look particularly impressive.  One can admire an early shot of desperate applicants for a shot at space travel trooping along the spiral walkway of an airport, but nothing that follows equals it, and overall Fiona Crombie’s production design and Catherine George’s costumes are just okay.  Darius Khondji’s cinematography is oppressively murky and claustrophobic, while Yang Jinmo’s editing feels sluggish; together they make rather a hash of the big finale, and a nightmarish insert at the close is one of Bong’s most misguided contrivances.  Jung Jaeil’s score often goes silent, which is fine since when it opens up, it proves unmemorable.

Admirers of Bong’s earlier films will probably expend a great deal of effort trying to find something nice to say about “Mickey 17,” but as with “Okja,” which was a similarly bloated mélange of half-baked ideas told on a grand scale, that will be a tough sell.  Fortunately, his other half-dozen films offer plenty of proof of what his eccentric talent can achieve. 

As for Warner Bros., this costly fiasco could very well be the 2025 equivalent of “Joker: Folie à Deux.”