Film reviews: Mickey 17 and Last Breath

Mickey 17

Directed by Bong Joon-ho (R)

Bong Joon-ho’s long-awaited follow-up to Parasite is the 2019 Oscar winner’s “biggest swing yet,” said David Ehrlich in Indie Wire. “A wry and resoundingly sweet space adventure,” Mickey 17 casts Robert Pattinson as a sap who takes a job in which he serves as a guinea pig for outer space hazards, being killed repeatedly and then reproduced by a DNA printer. But while the spiky premise combines elements from Snowpiercer and Okja, Bong’s previous English-language features, “this isn’t just another great Bong Joon-ho movie about how much he hates capitalism.” It’s also “the first Bong movie about how much he loves people.”

Pattinson eventually plays two copies of Mickey, and his “game-for-anything” dual performance makes the movie “entertaining enough,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. But the storytelling is “cluttered,” and “the satirical thrust feels heavy-handed.” Mark Ruffalo plays the villainous leader of the space-colonization mission with an overtly Trumpian sneer, and “the intriguing concept of recyclable people gets bumped aside too often in favor of a clownish take on the corruption of power.” For Bong, “there is something in the shift to a broader big-budget canvas that persistently defeats him,” giving this “loopy futuristic farce” a disjointed effect, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. Fortunately, Pattinson “doesn’t just save the film but deepens it.” His character’s “purgatorial existence becomes a demented search for grace.”

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Last Breath

Directed by Alex Parkinson (PG-13)

“Last Breath is an unreal account of cheating death,” and yet the story it dramatizes is true, said Brianna Zigler in The A.V. Club. Thirteen years ago, saturation diver Chris Lemons was performing routine pipeline repair work at the bottom of the ocean when the cord attaching him to his diving bell snapped, leaving two fellow divers almost no chance to find him in vast darkness before his oxygen ran out. Director Alex Parkinson previously made a documentary of the same name about the incident, and while even Woody Harrelson can’t do much with his slice of the screenplay’s thin characterizations, “Parkinson and his team effectively translate the documentary into a lean, heart-palpitating thriller.”

The film “gravely evokes the details of one of the most dangerous trades on earth,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. The dialogue is perfunctory, to the point that the movie seems half-finished. Harrelson, who plays a diver who supervised the repair attempt, is only given a few lines to establish his character’s story, and “to have such a talented actor and give him so little to do feels like dereliction of duty.” Fortunately, “the documentary origins shine through,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. “There are few things as chilling as an oxygen countdown clock and, even worse, a ‘time without oxygen’ count-up.” If you can forgive the phoned-in bits on land, Last Breath makes for a satisfyingly scary plunge into “a trade that would be, for many, their worst nightmare.”