'Mickey 17' review: Bong Joon-ho's sci-fi satire fizzles

"Have a nice death, see you tomorrow," a friend tells Mickey Barnes, the oft-reincarnted hero of "Mickey 17." The title tells us how many times Mickey, an amiable drip played by Robert Pattinson, has emerged from the human reprinting machine, and if you’ve seen the trailer then you know Mickey 18 is about to cause some trouble. It’s a promising setup from writer-director Bong Joon-ho (working from an Edward Ashton novel), whose bizarre and highly inventive comedy "Parasite" was the most Oscar-decorated film of 2019.

Joon-ho, however, is an uneven filmmaker whose output includes critically acclaimed dramas ("Memories of Murder"), a cutesy-weird Netflix comedy ("Okja") and the thrilling epic "Snowpiercer." Among the common threads in his films — even the best ones — are heavy-handed themes, a tendency to overstuff and a reluctance to settle on a single ending. In "Mickey 17," all work together to sink what could have been an entertainingly gonzo sci-fi satire.

After an opening series of Mickey’s ghastly demises — he’s an "expendable," used mostly as a guinea pig for various poison gases — we meet Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a high-spirited soldier who takes an unlikely shine to him. We also meet Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a grandstanding politician with a Trumpian knack for showbiz, though his lockjaw accent and prominent teeth are distinctly Kennedyesque. (Toni Collette plays his wife, Ylfa, a frosted-blonde caricature of elitist cruelty.) They’re all living on the planet Niflheim, which Marshall envisions as a "pure white" colony — odd, given the racial diversity of the population, which includes Steven Yuen as a slippery drug dealer and Steve Park as a noble captain.

Enter the Creepers, intelligent insectoids — think pill bugs, but with tank-strength shells — who are misunderstood by humans. Enter, also, the aforementioned Mickey 18 (Pattinson, again), who’s reprinted by mistake and possesses an unexpected thirst for violence. "I’m not going to live like you," he snarls at his meeker self. Now the movie has a choice: Will Mickey’s aggressive new id finally wreak havoc on Niflheim? Or will the whole story become an overearnest parable about sentient species and the evils of colonialism? Sadly, it’s the latter, and this overlong movie spends its final half-hour trying to stitch together its semi-related ideas.

If Mickey’s dopey smile and bowl-cut hairdo remind you of a certain comedian, that’s intentional: Pattinson based his performance partly on Jim Carrey’s Lloyd Christmas in "Dumb and Dumber." The result is a character who feels both naggingly familiar and slightly irritating. In the end, the deathless Mickey 17, and the movie as a whole, both outstay their welcome.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com