Mickey 17 (2025)

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) was surprised to wake up.  He found himself at the bottom of a snow-covered crevasse on the planet Niflheim.  How could he get out?  Luckily, his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) arrived.  Timo was surprised that Mickey wasn't dead yet; he had only come looking for Mickey's weapon, which was on a ledge above.  Leaving Mickey to his fate, Timo left.  How did he come to this?

Mickey and Timo had borrowed money from a shady character to launch a business.  It had failed spectacularly, and the lender intended to recoup his losses by carving the pair of them into pieces with a chainsaw.  In order to escape this fate, Mickey and Timo signed onto a colony ship bound for a distant planet.  Where Timo had a skill that earned him a spot - the waiting list was long, Mickey did not.  He volunteered to be an expendable.  He was given all the dangerous work.  If he died, a newly printed clone would take his place.  So far, he had died 16 times, making his current incarnation Mickey 17.

Mickey has a girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie).  The colony ship is led by Ken Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a buffoonish congressman who lost his election so he paraphrased Davy Crockett: "You can go to hell -- I'm going to Niflheim."  His wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), is no smarter that her dull-witted husband, but she encourages him in his stupidity.  Yes, this is supposed to be a dark comedy, but the idiocy of these villains is pathetic, not funny.

It was hard to like Mickey.  He comes across as a hapless victim.  The laughs are few and far between.  Mickey falling naked out of the printer because no one put the print tray in place proved to be a repeated joke.  Oh, so funny.  Ugh.  Some of the world building was cool, notably the explanation of how cloning was outlawed on Earth and how the only exception for cloning was if the previous incarnation was dead, thus Mickey's loophole for regular resurrection.  Of course, Mickey 17 surviving the fall into the crevasse and returning to the colony ship resulted in a multiples violation.  The Nasha and the Mickeys demonstrated stupidity in trying to resolve this issue before they could get caught.  Ugh.

Disappointing.  Skip.