The seventeen deaths of Robert Pattinson

One need only glance at this newspaper to realize that we do not live in subtle times. Right and left we find demagogues proclaiming absolute truths and divisions between good and evil that do not understand nuances. It is only fair, then, that Mickey 17 respond to this moral defeat by identifying the damage in a messianic intergalactic tycoon that Mark Ruffalo embodies with an inflamed vehemence and a stupid vileness that points unambiguously and without reservation Donald Trump. This condemns Ruffalo to a role closer to that of an imitator than to the full development of a character, but Bong Joon-ho has never had problems when it comes to moving in the strident farce, perhaps because of his ability to overlap all kinds of situations and bombard the screen with ideas guaranteeing a permanent flow of energy.

Five years after the global success of Parasites, Bong returns to the codes of science fiction that he already twisted Snowpiercer, which has become the guiding theme of his entire filmography: the defenselessness of the individual before power, an idea that in Mickey 17 takes the hallucinated face of Robert Pattinson like a poor shepherd who would have done well to read the small print before signing the document in which he declared his body cannon fodder susceptible to being torn apart and cloned according to the needs of the contracting company. The recital cartoonish The futile deaths to which the protagonist is subjected provide the most brilliant moments of a film where Bong once again stands out as the orchestrator of chaos, but in which he also slips for the first time into a certain imprecision (or, directly, self-indulgence), accumulating characters, gags that do not work completely (like the excess footage that causes the film to arrive exhausted (and exhausting) to its conclusion.

The director of 'Parasites' returns with an anti-Trump comedy