Reviews: 'Mickey 17,' 'Black Bag,' and 'Eephus'

Shorter takes on three new releases

There’s a little bit of something for everyone in this batch of short-form reviews: Sci-fi spectacle, spy craft, baseball!

All three of these films are worth seeing, even if I have qualms about a couple of them.

Mickey 17

When you win the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, you are entitled to accept a fairly large budget from a big American studio and do whatever you want with it. I don’t make the rules!

Bong Joon Ho is lucky enough to have been given this chance twice. Not because he’s had two Best Picture winners, but because he partnered with Netflix when they first started lighting money on fire to elbow their way into cinematic respectability.

That partnership yielded Okja, an outlandish, gory, and gooey sci-fi adventure about a young girl and her big-ass creature pet. Now, about 5 years after Bong’s masterful critical darling Parasite, we have another outlandish, gory, and gooey sci-fi adventure that costs a lot of money.

Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson in multiple roles. He is Mickey, a man on the run from loan sharks who signs up for a space colonization mission without reading the fine print. His contract says that he is an “Expendable,” and not like Sylvester Stallone.

On this expedition, led by an Elon Musk/Donald Trump hybrid and his wife (Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette, doing way, way too much), Mickey has inadvertently signed up to die, over and over. When they land on a new planet, they send Mickey out to test the atmosphere. When they need to develop a vaccine so everyone can survive on this new planet, they test it on Mickey.

The scientists on the ship can do this to Mickey because they’re able to clone him from a glorified 3D printer and upload his consciousness to a new body each time he dies. It’s all fun and games until one Mickey doesn’t die and meets the new clone.

Mickey 17 works best as a gross-out comedy; the most memorable images are of its central character coming face to face with death, yet again. Throughout the course of the film, we’ll see him suffer all kinds of skin rashes, amputations, and other mutilations. Pattinson is exceptional in the role(s), his physicality and warmth are crucial to anchoring a movie where character development often takes a backseat.

Outside of its fantastic central performance, the film is a big, messy swing. It’s an entertaining action spectacle that overstays its welcome, a violent sci-fi satire that pulls a few too many punches in excoriating its would-be space fascists. Ultimately, Bong is too much of a softy to go full Starship Troopers.

Black Bag

I wanted to love Black Bag. I want to love every new movie I see, but I especially wanted to love a Steven Soderbergh-helmed thriller about married spies played by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.

Alas, I merely enjoyed Black Bag quite a bit.

The film is both airtight and playful, it has wonderful performances, and it’s unapologetically sexy. Watching Blanchett and Fassbender practice British spycraft, maneuvering around each other and everyone in their orbit, is inherently pleasurable to me.

Several times throughout the film, however, I found myself thinking: “Why the hell does this movie look like this?”

Soderbergh is one of the most reliable, varied, and intelligent filmmakers working today. He’s excelled at large-scale entertainments, movie star vehicles, and low-budget independent productions; at biopics, heist films, and workplace comedies. Hell, 2 months ago he had a horror movie in theaters that was filmed from the point of view of a ghost.¹

I love him, I love how prolific he is; I wish he’d taken a little more time on this one, though. Some of the lighting in Black Bag is distracting to the point of madness. How can some of the most beautiful people in the world be borderline unwatchable?

It’s worth sticking it out, though, because the rest of the movie is wonderful. The script, by David Koepp, is filled with decidedly modern espionage conceits like satellite surveillance and drone strikes. Everyone’s watching and being watched, a point the movie doesn’t belabor but bakes into its story naturally. Still, it’s the reliable old set pieces- dinner parties, lie detector tests- where Black Bag truly shines. And I say shine as both a compliment (editing, acting, writing) and a criticism (the actual lights).

Eephus

Carson Lund’s debut feature takes its name from a baseball pitch designed to frustrate players and throw them off their game. It’s a high-arcing pitch that, when compared to something like a fastball, seems maddeningly slow to the batter.

Or so the characters in Eephus say. I’m not a baseball fan; I understand the basic mechanics of the game, but if you asked me to elaborate on anything I said above I’d have to consult Google.

Thankfully, enjoying Eephus is not a matter of (sighs) inside baseball. It is, first and foremost, a deft, smartly written comedy imbued with a sense of impending loss. Two amateur New England baseball teams have gathered for their final game at the field where they’ve been playing for years. You get the sense that most of them won’t be going to play on another field; some of them don’t seem particularly happy to be playing on this one.

Eephus doesn’t lean into the saccharine in telling its wistful, laid-back story. It’s pleasantly thorny, yet relaxes into the rhythm of a game that some players are straining to instill with pageantry. They want this game to be more special than it was ever going to be, while other players shrug it off.

This is the central conflict of the movie, one that Lund and co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher mine to hilarious yet understated effect. The cast is a mostly unknown group of memorably worn faces and fresh, cocky young ones; the team dynamics feel authentic, which is to say that they get along well enough but start to bicker more and more as the game wears on well after sunset.

I was glad to see Eephus in a theater not just so I could watch it with a crowd, but so I could appreciate the rich, layered sound design. Many of the film’s best jokes are mumbled off-camera, as players taunt and grumble about each other under their breath. There are moments of subdued melancholy too, though the film doesn’t exactly view this Last Game as a tragedy.

The field is only remarkable because these people have been coming here over and over for years; stoners and soccer players gather on the periphery, enjoying their respective routines just like the baseball teams. It’s not like a big corporation is swooping in to claim this plot of worn earth and thick foliage. A school is being built on the land; the movie is gently mourning the end of an era while quietly conceding to another one.

Mickey 17, Black Bag, and Eephus are currently playing in theaters.

1. My review of Presence from the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival