MICKEY 17*****

MICKEY 17 is Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho's much anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning political satire, PARASITE. Once again, his concerns are with economic inequality and political hypocrisy, and as with PARASITE, MICKEY 17 contains moments of trenchant laughter.  But the mood here is lighter, zanier, looser, and altogether more.... gonzo than PARASITE.  The political satire is broad and crude, the violence is ultra, but at heart this is a gorgeous love story and a plea for humanity.

Robert Pattinson continues to make astonishingly good career choices and stars as the eponymous Mickey.  He's basically a harmless but feckless and aimless man in a near-future dystopia.  On the run from mafia loansharks, abetted by his supposed best mate Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey stupidly signs up to be an Expendable.  He is basically an indentured slave to an exploitative space colonisation mission, put in harms way, killed again and again, and then just reprinted out.  As the film opens, we are on the seventeenth iteration.

Joy of joys! Feckless Mickey somehow falls in love and lust with Naomie Ackie's kickass space-cop Nasha and she loves him back! In fact, I would read this film as a love story most of all.  Improbable, hilarious, sexy, weird, but a love story nonetheless. But things get weird when Mickey 17 is somehow alive at the same time as his sassier, more mischievous reprint Mickey 18.  And both set out to rise up against the kleptocratic rule of a character clearly based on Trump, with a Macchiavellian wife modelled on Imelda Marcos.  Mark Ruffalo seems to be reprising his role in POOR THINGS here, but it's a no less fun turn for that.   But the star of the show is clearly Pattinson.  And the the Creepers. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the plot but I would pay a LOT of money for a plushy that looks like a baby creeper.

MICKEY 17 has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

PARASITE

PARASITE is a rightly critically acclaimed black comedy/political satire from Korean director Bong Joon Ho. It's a film that speaks to the profound income inequality that we see around the world, and the social anxieties that the super-rich invent to give them something to do.  The rich family in question here lives in a beautifully modernist house - mother, father, spoiled son, elder daughter.  They are placed in contrast with a poor family living in one of Seoul's "sub-basements" - dank, fetid, insect-infested, sub-standard housing for the city's poorest residents - prone to flood during the rainy season. Improbably, the son in the poor family gets an in to the rich family, pretending to be a university student to tutor the daughter. He then contrives to have their driver and housekeeper sacked and to get his own mother and father to replace them. He also gets his sister into the house as a tutor for the small kid.  Of course they have to pretend not to know each other. The movie reaches its climax when the rich family go away on holiday, and the old housekeeper comes back, vowing revenge, and with her own dark secret to protect.  The result is skewering, violent, social revenge. Because as feckless and laughably superficial the rich family is, they still have their prejudices - expressed here as the fear of the fetid stink of the sub-basement dwellers.  They can lock the poor out of their gated house, but that smell comes over the walls.....

This film is beautifully constructed, acted and built.  The modernist house and sub-basement are meticulously created.  The script is at turns hilarious, tragic and absurd.  The performances both move one to tears and laughter. The film isn't without its longeurs in the middle section, and I would've ended it ten minutes before it ends, but this is nothing in a film of such originality and audacity.  There's a particular scene, where the poor family sneak out of the rich house on the hill, through pouring rain and flooded streets, down and down through the city's streets and staircases, to the hellish world of the flooded sub-basement. It's poetic and tragic.

As with THE KINGMAKER this is a film that speaks to us in the West. The income inequality and class prejudice resonate.  You could easily remake this film set in the OC, or in Notting Hill.  And I'm sure somebody will.

PARASITE has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Cannes 2019 where it won the Palme D'Or by unanimous verdict. It also played Telluride and Toronto. It opened in the USA in October and opens in the UK on February 20th 2020.