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.”

Producers: Kelly McCormick, David Leitch and Guy Daniella  Director: Jonathan Eusebio   Screenplay: Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore   Cast: Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Daniel Wu, Mustafa Shakir, Lio Tipton, Cam Gigandet, Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch, André Eriksen, Sean Astin and Drew Scott   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: D

 If movies and TV series are anything to go by, the profession of “hit man” must be among the most overstuffed in the country; story after story follows one of them out on the job, or called out of retirement to resume his bloody work, either eagerly or reluctantly.  The latest example is “Love Hurts,” in which Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan plays Marvin Gable, an apparently mild-mannered Milwaukee realtor who was once an accomplished killer and is forced to put his old skills to the test when his gangster brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) and a small army of his minions come after him, prompted by the reappearance of Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose).  She’s an erstwhile financial confederate of Knuckles whom Marvin, then working for his brother, had supposedly offed and buried because Knuckles thought she’d embezzled from him, but whose death Marvin faked because he loved her.

This laborious backstory is presented in occasional flashbacks, but more often through interior monologues delivered in voiceover as Bridger Nielson’s camera stares at the speaker.  It’s a crude, boring way to feed us the information.

And it’s parceled out bit by bit over the course of the movie, which begins with amiable Marvin baking heart-shaped cookies for his staff to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  All seem happy to take one save for his aide Ashley (energetic Lio Tipton), who’s depressed over her empty life.  That emptiness will soon be filled with romance when a hit man going by the nom de slaughter Raven (Mustafa Shakir) arrives to compel Marvin to reveal the location of Rose, whose unexpected return Marvin has already suspected because of the moustaches he used to wear being added to his advertisements around town.  Raven is a sensitive sort, and after Marvin leaves him defeated in his office, Ashley finds him and is moved by his death-obsessed poetry (apparently he chose his work pseudonym from devotion to Poe).

Meanwhile Rose has reconnected with Marvin, and the poor fellow must choose between the new life he says he loves and his rekindled love for her, despite the fact that as portrayed here, she seems a particularly unpleasant, if undeniably sexy, person.  Naturally, also one who was framed by others in Knuckles’ circle, notably Renny Merlo (Cam Gigandet, whose default mode is a nasty sneer) and one Kippy Betts (gruesomely unfunny Rhys Darby, whose torture scene feels well deserved).

Merlo sends two more men after Marvin and Rose—King (Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch) and Otis (André Eriksen), whose banter about the latter’s “emotional constipation” at least brings a smidgen of genuine amusement to a movie that’s perhaps fifty percentage martial artsy fights and gun battles and ends, as it must, in a prolonged fraternal beatdown between Marvin and Knuckles.  The fights are extremely complicated choreographically, boasting some unusual shots courtesy of Nielson (in one case, from the inside of a microwave and a refrigerator as Marvin tries to save a cherished plaque), but though Quan and the others (as well as their stunt doubles) pull them off well enough, they lack the dash and visual pizzazz of the best such onscreen action.  It’s also unfortunate that the script introduces some characters, like Marvin’s supportive boss Cliff (Sean Astin, bigger than ever in his “Goonies” reunion with Quan) and his real estate rival Jeff (Drew Scott) only to have some disposable folks around.

It’s nice, of course, to see Quan get a chance at a lead role after so many years of being overlooked, but with a nod to his comeback role, this might be retitled “Nothing, Nowhere All at Once,” and had it been made when “The Goonies” was released, it would have occupied the “straight to video” shelf at Blockbusters. In any event, he’s actually pretty bland;  quite frankly Bob Odenkirk was far more successful playing the mousy guy returning to a violent past in 2021’s “Nobody,” a much better picture.  (If you want a really good hit man comedy, though, Richard Linklater’s eponymous Netflix effort remains unsurpassed among recent offerings.)  Under direction from Jonathan Eusebio that’s awfully flat in the non-action scenes, DeBose, Gigandet and Wu mostly just strike poses, none of them very interesting; so does Shakir, but unlike theirs, his are funny  become of his steely-eyed solemnity.  Though it’s supposedly set in Milwaukee, the Canadian-shot movie’s sense of place is basically limited to a close-up of a Wisconsin license plate.  Otherwise the movie, with a production design by Craig Sandells, has a thoroughly ordinary look though Patricia J. Henderson’s costumes show some imagination, especially in terms of DeBose’s duds.                

In the end “Love Hurts” feels like “John Wick” minus the style—and the dog and car.  If there’s a saving grace to the movie, it’s that, as edited by Elisabet Ronaldsdottir it only runs eighty-three minutes, even if it feels a lot longer, particularly in the overextended fight scenes.  Dominic Lewis’ score, coy in the seriocomic bits and booming in the action ones, is hardly a plus.    

Incidentally, it’s interesting to note that in both the major studio movies being released for Valentine’s Day this year, a straw is employed as a murder weapon.  If you’re taking your sweetheart out on the 14^th and you’ve seen this movie (or “Heart Eyes”) together, you might want to consider an upscale place where the drinks don’t invite their use, lest your date get the wrong idea.