The unexpected pratfalls and face-plants common in the films of Bong Joon Ho serve a greater purpose than cheap laughs. For the director, physical humour is a device to condemn classism, writes David Opie.
Nothing is off limits for South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho. That’s true of the violence depicted throughout each of his movies, yes, but it’s even more true of the humour that comes with it. Despite the plethora of genres he’s explored over the past three decades, Bong’s work as a writer and director is instantly recognisable thanks to his savagely wicked funny bone. Falls, especially, seem to tickle him no end. No one is safe from face-planting to the floor in his movies, whether a well-meaning father is looking for his kid (The Host, 2006) or a mutant super pig is smashing its way through Daiso (Okja, 2017).
The pull of gravity is truly inescapable in Bong’s universe, yet it’s his latest space-set adventure, on a ship where gravity is technically non-existent, that his love for pratfalls and slapstick comedy as a whole shines through most. And crucially, it’s not just included for laughs either.
On the face of it, Mickey 17 shouldn’t be very funny at all. Bong’s third English-language movie is obsessed with death, actually, killing Mickey off over and over again in increasingly brutal ways. Yet he keeps returning regardless, and that’s because Robert Pattinson’s character has signed up to die for a living. He’s an ‘expendable’, which means the ruthless company he works for can ‘print’ out a new body for Mickey every time he snuffs it. But there’s nothing sacred or profound about this eternal life Mickey finds himself living. It’s quite the opposite, in fact.
When Mickey’s lying broken at the bottom of an ice cavern, Steven Yeun’s Timo rather cheerfully wishes his expendable colleague ‘a nice death’ before leaving him to die there in agonising pain. An early montage of deaths rams home the absurdity of this more, including one ‘accidental’ death and another where Mickey’s not been informed of the radiation risks he’s been deliberately exposed to until it’s too late. And yet still we laugh, not because jokes are being made, but because of how the capitalist structures in this not-so-distant future treat human life as a joke.
Mickey 17 (2025)
That’s nothing new for Bong. The inherent cruelty of capitalism has long been intrinsic to his worldview, most obviously in films like Parasite (2019) and Snowpiercer (2013), but also very vividly in his less seen debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), where the cruelty plays out mostly hidden in a dank apartment basement. But Mickey 17 drags this disdain for human life kicking and screaming out into the light, quite literally every time we see Mickey reprinted out of a futuristic cloning machine.
The process, akin to a Nineties inkjet printer, finds Pattinson’s body juddering in and out like a piece of paper. And just as we’ve all been guilty of not paying attention when printing, leaving that sheet to fall, the same is true for Mickey, whose new, naked, vulnerable body almost tumbles out of the printer because the technician isn’t watching. No one in power seems to care, even when Mickey complains, and why would they? He’s just expendable, and these expendable new bodies he keeps finding himself in are pointedly made of waste material, the bits that society no longer wants or needs.
Mickey 17 (2025)
That’s a heavy realisation to contend with, but not in Bong’s hands. Here, it’s funny to watch the technician scramble to save Mickey at the last minute, even though the hero we’ve been encouraged to identify with is about to undergo a serious injury. Bringing seemingly incongruous elements together to elicit an intense emotional response is what Bong does best. The bigger the gap, the stronger the reaction, and throughout his work, that usually takes the form of physical comedy in the moments you might least expect it.
For Mickey 17, it’s in the shuddering printing process, the severed hand that floats past a big window and the goofball sensitivity Pattinson brings to Mickey himself, whether he’s sliding down the stairs or collapsing after he’s been electrocuted in the most exaggerated way possible.
It’s no wonder that Pattinson mentioned his love of Buster Keaton to Deadline recently, because the physicality he brings to each version of Mickey channels Keaton and other silent-era greats like Charlie Chaplin. Bong too draws inspiration from them in the way he weaponises the slapstick comedy they were known for to brutal effect.
Mickey 17 (2025)
While the various stunts and acrobatics of the craft usually simulate pain without any real consequence, Mickey’s pain is all too real. In fact, the threat of death that comes with said pain is firmly established here in ways that slapstick usually skirts around. Wile E. Coyote never actually dies, no matter how many times he falls into that canyon, but the opposite is true for Mickey, who ends up dying constantly.
By grounding the hyper-stylised fakeness usually inherent to slapstick, Bong’s films catch us off guard with sudden shifts back and forth between horror and comedy that make us question why we’re laughing in the first place.
Should we be laughing? That’s what Bong wants us to consider when Chris Evans suddenly slips on a fish during Snowpiercer’s climactic battle, or when Won Bin totally misjudges kicking that car wing mirror in Mother (2009). As the titular Host monster falls down stairs during a dangerous chase or Bae Doona slams into a door in Barking Dogs Never Bite, we laugh because we’re taken by surprise.
Parasite (2019)
That’s especially true in the ridiculous, unhinged climax of Parasite and a manic chase sequence in Mickey 17 where everyone falls over themselves scrambling to catch a rogue creature like this is a black-and-white Keaton short from the Twenties. As far back as Incoherence, an early Bong short from 1994, the filmmaker plays with this style of comedy when a newspaper delivery man gives chase to an affluent jogger who’s been stealing milk from other people’s doorsteps en route.
In each case, Bong bridges the sadistic and the slapstick to make us consider the power hierarchies that govern our lives, be it all-powerful corporations or simply the rich family who lives upstairs. No easy answers are given – just like Chaplin couldn’t help becoming a cog in the machine in Modern Times (1936), we too are all trapped in circumstances beyond our control – yet Bong always seeks to level the playing field anyway.
WATCH MICKEY 17 IN CINEMAS
