TMW #33: Mickey 17, Daredevil: Born Again and On Falling reviewed

Your weekly dose of reviews, recommedations and trailers

Friday greetings, film fans,

Thanks for joining us for another review round-up Friday. This week, we’re seeing double with Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, looking at the rebirth of a popular Marvel superhero in Daredevil: Born Again, and spotlighting an impressive new voice as writer/director Laura Carreira makes her feature debut with On Falling.

And even bigger thanks are due if you’re also joining us below the paywall, with further recommendations including a brand new buddy comedy and an Oscar-winning doc available to watch free at home. Plus, our regular round-up of the week’s biggest trailers, featuring Ana de Armas kicking ass, Tom Hardy getting his hands dirty, and a childhood favourite being desecrated.

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Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll be back on Tuesday with more movie goodness, including an interview with the ultra-talented Tom Burke. See you then!

Matt (Jordan and Matthew)

Mickey 17

15, in cinemas now

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Robert Pattinson and Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 (credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

Expendables in the world of Mickey 17 are not the same thing as expendables in the world of Stallone-Statham team-ups, though they are about as likely to meet a gruesome end. In the nearish future of 2054, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to be an expendable for an off-world colonising mission: the largely thankless role sees him treated like a human crash test dummy (literally in one scene), exposed to all manner of danger, safe in the knowledge that in the event of his death a clone will be reprinted for continued guinea pig duties.

This is the concept at the heart of director Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite. Containing echoes of both Snowpiercer and Okja (social metaphor writ large in high concept, ugly-cute oversized critters), satirical sci-fi Mickey 17 doesn’t feel the need to tread a mainstream path despite having an A-list star and an evidently considerable budget. This is Pattinson firmly in his funny-voiced weirdo register (he’s aping Steve Buscemi’s tones here), but in the full context of the film, milquetoast Mickey is an endearing protagonist, the silliness always laced with sincerity.

The version of Mickey that Pattinson spends most time as is 17, and when the plot finally kicks into gear he also shares the screen with himself as Mickey 18, a more confident, decisive copy who accidentally ends up existing at the same time as his counterpart, contravening the ethical and legal guidelines for expendables. The need to keep this a secret, combined with the emerging issue of planet Niflheim’s resident species, gives the film its narrative momentum in the second half.

Following an unimpeachable masterpiece like Parasite was always going to be tricky, and Mickey 17 isn’t without its faults. The backstory catch-up at the beginning kills some momentum, and the satire is as subtle as Mark Ruffalo’s false teeth, which will be too broad for some (the satire and the teeth). Ruffalo plays the selfish, scheming politician leading the colonising mission and Toni Collette is his organ-grinder wife. Both are very funny, but play it Okja-level heightened.

There’s ultimately something cheering about a sci-fi so idiosyncratic getting made on this scale. Thought-provoking blockbusters are rare, and Mickey 17 merges philosophical musings and scathing satire with off-kilter humour: where else do you get ruminations on what it means to be human while a fresh clone is ejected from the reprinter to flomp straight on the floor in a moment of deft physical comedy?

Naomi Ackie also gives one of her strongest performances to date as the security agent who dates Mickey(s), and Steven Yeun is enjoyably slippery as Timo, the friend who gets Mickey into this mess in the first place. There’s also oppressive production design in the claustrophobic ship that takes the volunteers on the long, lonely journey to Niflheim, and Bong’s affinity for creatures comes through in the planet’s “creepers”: imagine a louse spliced with a mammoth and you’re somewhere close to picturing the furry, multi-legged inhabitants. But really this is a showcase for Pattinson’s affinity for oddballs, and his willingness to subvert his movie-idol traits over and over again in service of the greater good. (Matt Maytum)

IN SHORT: Director Bong skilfully balances absurd satire with tactile sci-fi world-building, while Robert Pattinson is great many times over.

STAY FOR THE END CREDITS? No additional material here.

SOURCE CODING: The film is adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, so there’s been a serious case of clone inflation for the big screen. Ashton has also written a sequel, Antimatter Blues.

On Falling

15, in cinemas now

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Joana Santos in On Falling (credit: Conic)

Produced by Ken Loach’s production company Sixteen Films, On Falling feels like a companion piece to the director’s bleakly brilliant Sorry We Missed You. That film focused on a self-employed delivery driver crushed by stress; here, we follow a warehouse worker struggling with loneliness and depression. Aurora (Joana Santos) is a Portuguese immigrant employed/exploited as a barcode-scanning ‘picker’, trapped all day between the stuffed shelves of a Scottish ‘fulfilment centre’ (clearly inspired by a certain online retail behemoth). She lives in a shared house where any sense of companionship with her pleasant-enough cohabitants is faltering at best. There’s even less sense of human connection at work; Aurora strikes up a tentative bond with a co-worker over lunch, only to hear rumours the next day that he’s taken his own life.

Despite the downbeat mood and (necessarily) repetitive structure, debut writer/director Laura Carreira captures her protagonist’s slow suffocation in riveting docu-dramatic fashion. This is arguably the most quietly empathetic portrait of workplace isolation since Kitty Green’s The Assistant. When Aurora breaks her phone and is faced with repairs she can’t afford, there’s a genuine feeling of crisis, of a vital thread being cut. Santos’ performance is fully in tune with Carreira’s understated approach. Aurora’s lack of backstory seems apt, given that her life as we see it has been hollowed out; an emptiness Santos’ conveys with unshowy conviction. And when emotions do finally escape to the surface - in a job interview that could be a gateway to better things - the effect leaves you reeling. (Matthew Leyland)

RISING STAR: At last year’s London Film Festival Carreira picked up the Sutherland Award, a first-feature accolade whose previous recipients include Andrea Arnold, Robert Eggers and Lynne Ramsay.

Daredevil: Born Again

Eps 1-2 streaming now on Disney+, new eps weekly on Wednesday

⭐⭐⭐☆☆

Charlie Cox in Daredevil: Born Again (credit: Giovanni Rufino/Marvel Studios/Disney)

Seven years since his flagship show was cancelled – and multiple MCU cameos later – the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is finally back on screens. Season 4 of the beloved Netflix series in all but name, Born Again picks up the story of Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) one year after an inciting tragedy inspires Matt to hang up the cowl and billy club, while the former Kingpin of crime is elected mayor of New York. It’s a new dynamic with explosive potential, and no coincidence that this opening two-parter’s best scene is a verbal tête-à-tête between Murdock and Fisk across a diner table, Cox and D’Onofrio exchanging passive-aggressive pleasantries as if no time has passed. Similarly promising is a new case involving White Tiger – a vigilante whom Matt comes to defend when he’s falsely accused of murdering a police officer.

At the risk of damning with faint praise, it’s about as good as anything the MCU has put out in recent years but – two episodes in – is having a hard time reaching the heights of the original run. That famously full-on Daredevil fight choreography, for example, is almost there, but there’s a disappointing reliance on very obvious digi-doubles in this opening salvo’s sole Daredevil scrap. It’s also hard to shake the sense that everything feels that bit more glossy, and that bit less gritty here – a big part of the original run’s charm. And there’s a Big Swing death in the opening moments that the show has yet to truly earn. Whether it will, that’s a case for another day. (Jordan Farley)

BEHIND THE COWL: Originally planned as an 18-episode case-of-the-week reboot, Born Again was retooled during production as a 16-episode story split across two seasons, and to be much closer in tone and ethos to the original series.