If you have paid attention to enough film discourse in any medium you have likely come across the term “saved in the edit”, an explanation of a project whose raw footage would have resulted in a bad movie without the Herculean effort of its editors to cut, paste, and move things around until they made sense.
It’s the Hollywood version of spinning gold from straw and it has resulted in some of the biggest movies ever with Star Wars being the predominant example that gets the spotlight.
Mickey 17, unfortunately, is an example of the opposite. While we obviously haven’t seen the raw footage of the movie, we can attest that a lot of what is in this film is really good, but the edit lets it down and almost ruins the entire experience. But what is this experience it’s trying to sell us?
“From the Academy Award-winning writer/director of ‘Parasite,’ Bong Joon Ho, comes his next groundbreaking cinematic experience, ‘Mickey 17.’ The unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job… to die, for a living,” reads the official synopsis.
The star power of these two with a wider cast including Mark Ruffalo, combined with the source material (a book called Mickey7) had a lot of people excited for this one, especially when the trailer dropped and we got to see the this movie’s version of the future and hear Pattinson’s weird accent.
On the surface this should be a home run. Aside from the talent involved, this premise is so good and touches on so many themes that movies can really explore and expound upon. The meaning of life when we can simply make more, late stage capitalism when it’s even more late stage and the actions of humankind when presented with new frontiers that the species hasn’t encountered before.
And, again, we have to roll out the “unfortunately” train here. Mickey 17’s story only touches on these topics at a very surface level, a pattern that is utterly infuriating as the movie goes on.
This film will continually introduce and discuss topics and themes like the ones we mentioned. This had as, dozens of times, thinking “Of that will be fun to explore, I wonder how the movie will tackle this” only for the subject to be dropped entirely and never revisited again.
Even worse is the one or two topics it does remember to circle back to, which feel tacked on and disingenuous. It cast our mind back to our school days when writing essays and finally finishing the long project, only to realise we had forgotten to address a few points in the rubric. This resulted in a mad rush to awkwardly and messily re-insert dropped ideas into the middle of unrelated sections, making everything worse as a result.
This storytelling is shockingly amateurish and not at all what we’ve come to expect from the people involved. This absolutely flawed structure is made even worse when most scenes go on for way too long. Hours after seeing the movie we can still point to several scenes that needed to be cut down by 50 percent or more. It’s just entirely baffling that the movie has so little time to explore the really interesting stuff, but seemingly endless time to mess around with slapstick and irreverence.
Yes Mickey 17 definitely stylises itself as a comedy and yes, a lot of the jokes did land (at least with the audience in our screening), but even this aspect goes further to cheapen the story as a whole. We’re not saying a movie can’t balance deadly seriousness with humour, but this specific movie certainly cannot.
It seems like someone, even without access to the raw footage, could cut this movie as is into a much better experience. We won’t spoil anything but there’s a character in this movie and an associated plotline that could have been removed entirely without affecting the overall movie. If your characters and plotlines are that unimportant or detrimental to the overall movie, why include them?
With the story and its execution so abysmal, the cast does what it can to prop it up.
Pattinson is on the screen for maybe 90 percent of the film. He flipped between being annoying to indecipherable (thank you, continually bad Hollywood dialogue audio) to acting out a human being that simply doesn’t exist. His acting and voice choices are so bizarre but not in a let me see more, rubberneck at a car crash kind of a way, but more like that one person at a social event who makes your skin crawl but refuses to stop talking to you.
But, as you see in the trailers, there’s actually two of him in this movie, and the other version of himself is endlessly better executed, fun to watch and interesting.
The rest of the cast ranges from solid to joining in with Pattinson at simply being bothersome to take in. Ruffalo falls into that bothersome pot and the rest of the cast is a coin flip.
Mickey 17 claws a lot of its points back in mastery of other aspects of filmmaking. The look and feel of this world is superb. Every inch of the scenery seems real and tangible and, when there is the need for CGI, it’s rock solid and puts a lot of bigger movies to shame.
We were actually shocked by just how good a lot of this movie looks, and how clear and concise it is. There are, for example, quite a few scenes set in snow and snowstorms, and all of them look fantastic, unlike the blurry messes that a lot of movies portray them as.
And as much as we dumped on the script here, there is a lot to love in isolation. We’re just now recalling a few jokes that made us legitimately laugh, or ingenious segments that were surrounded by bad stuff.
These moments of gold go a long way towards us not writing Mickey 17 off entirely, and we can see the worse aspects of this movie being overlooked by other people. But for us, the final result is a movie that only manages to be “okay”.
FINAL SCORE: 5 OUT OF 10.
