What happens when success catches up with you and you can make all your dreams come true? You go big budget and make a sci-fi parody. Bong Jung-ho’s bloated extravaganza is leaden, pacey, and permits Pattinson to execute some bravura acting. It’s like a train ride which slows down and speeds up. Thinking specifically of a train we took in Bolivia, through the Chaco, where sometimes we were rolling merrily along and at others we were stuck, gazing at a few bushes, twigs, a suspicion of life. Looking back on the journey it was, all-in-all, enjoyable, albeit with moments of frustration. I don’t know if there’s anything much to take away from Mickey 17. The premise is Phillip K Dick lite, (Dostoyevsky lite?) and never quite extracts the full potential of the idea of a one person (soul?), inhabiting two bodies. It’s played for laughs, which is fair enough, but works against any pretension to actually have any underpinning philosophy. There is the constant sense of a project that has had money thrown at it, seeing what sticks. Fortunately in Pattinson the film has a protagonist who is charismatic enough to just about hold the whole thing together.
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