I saw it yesterday and while I'm a great admirer of Bong Joon-Ho's work, I don't particularly like his Western films. I didn't like Snowpiercer and I found Okja terrible, and had no real excitement hearing he was behind this. However, after seeing this, I was pleasantly surprised. Bong Joon-Ho is a phenomenal director and he is in top form here. There's sprinklings of ideas from Snowpiercer and Okja in this but his approach to it is so laser-focused and finessed, he really elevates the work. That's important because the script for this felt like it was written by an 18 year old.
There's a stark difference between his approach to filmmaking in his native Korean productions and Western movies. Ho doesn't speak English and wasn't brought up in the English-speaking world, so he doesn't fully understand the minutiae of cultural norms commonly held in this part of the world; he only knows what he's picked up from English-speaking movies. When it comes to directing an international cast, he doesn't direct acting so much as he directs pastiche, if that makes sense. He instructs his performers to go big and ham it up so their performances read to him visually, even if it doesn't feel "real" and can sometimes come off as awkward to English speakers. Dialogue in this sense is just noise and that is the thing that bothers me most in his international movies. There's a tangible cultural divide that makes itself apparent.
Mickey 17 is definitely the best of his three Western movies in my opinion, but that's solely because of the directing and how close to his Korean movies this feels in comparison to the others. It's really the performances and the script that bring it just a bit down for me. The script isn't awful, but it's B-movie shlock that feels like a teenager getting into Scorsese movies wrote. Snowpiercer and Okja were no different in this regard, too. Bong Joon-Ho makes smaller, more intimate, precisely-made character stories in Korea, and makes big, broad, high-concept, B-movies when he gets jobs abroad. It's unfortunate his impeccable skills can't overcome the cultural barrier, but Mickey as another entry in the latter camp is definitely the better made of the three he's done.
