Hey, ‘Mickey’ you’re not so fine: Ambitious sci-fi comedy disappoints with restrained laughs, muddled metaphors

“Mickey 17” — 2.5 stars

Having watched Bong Joon Ho’s slightly too-lengthy and bombastically zany sci-fi black comedy “Mickey 17” only 24 hours after witnessing the Academy Awards broadcast, this question came to me.

Could Ho’s star, Robert Pattinson, be simultaneously nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for playing two different versions of the same character in a single movie?

Actually, Pattinson plays 18 different versions of the same character, some of them lasting only a few nano seconds on screen.

Brimming with ambitious ideas and a few sharp shards of edgy comedy, “Mickey 17” takes place in a dystopian 2050 when the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, forcing a corporate church organization to embark on a four-year mission to colonize an icy planet called Niflhiem.

Success depends on disposable organic copies of human beings called Expendables (no relation to the “Expendable” film franchise starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis as disposable organic copies of human beings).

Pattinson’s Mickey, not the brightest star in the solar system, doesn’t understand what the job entails when he signs up to become an Expendable.

Each time he dies — by being baked alive in a radiation test, or by inhaling toxic viruses on Niflhiem until scientists can develop a vaccine — technicians reprint his physical body from a mass of trashed tissues and reprogram his memories so the next Mickey can go on to his next useful death.

The Mickey we meet is his 16th sequel. (We catch a quick, sickly comic montage of the earlier Mickeys meeting all sorts of hideous fates before being thrown into a hellish cauldron, sometimes not quite dead yet.)

The leader of the Niflhiem mission, a failed politician and religious zealot named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, performing a strained and unfunny imitation of Donald Trump’s congested speaking style), regards Expendables as property, as does his slithery Macbethian wife, Ylfa (a waste of Toni Collette’s talents here), who obsesses over manufacturing savory sauces from weird organic materials such as Creeper tails. (More on that in a moment.)

In this perversely ethical universe, Expendables are illegal on Earth, but not in space. This might reference Ava DuVernay’s “13th,” which details how Southern states got around an Amendment banning slavery by arresting and convicting thousands of Black males on trumped-up charges. As convicted criminals, they could be pressed into forced free labor.

But I jest. The screenplay, written by Ho and based on the novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton, comes off a bit too superficial and slight to dig this deep.

Marshall must deal with other government regulations stipulating that there cannot be more than one Expendable copy of a person at a time.

So, of course, when Mickey 17 is presumed killed, technicians quickly reprint Mickey 18, played by Pattison as a scowling, self-centered bully in sharp contrast to 17’s recessively benign personality. (And if there can only be one Mickey, 18 will make sure it won’t be his lower number.)

The comic possibilities suddenly become infinite when a hot-to-trot Nasha (Naomi Ackie) seems to reenact the trio love scenes from “Challengers” by doubling her fun with lucky 17 and 18. She hopes that her chief rival Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) doesn’t give them up to the authorities.

Meanwhile, Mickey 17 discovers that the planet’s indigenous alien-armadillo-like creatures — nicknamed Creepers — are actual sentient beings with families, not “cockroaches” as Marshall calls them. He plans to wipe them out with poison gas (a reference to Nazi death camps?).

The disappointing “Mickey 17” radiates comic potential, but settles for amused guffaws when it wants to go for hard, gasping laughs of the sort inspired by the disturbingly insightful and shocking elements in Ho’s Oscar-winning Best Picture “Parasite.”

It doesn’t help that Pattinson’s mannered, first-person voice-over narration quickly devolves into a narrative annoyance, and into inconsistency during scenes where things occur that he, as a character, would never know about.

So, should Pattinson be simultaneously nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for playing two different versions of the same character in a single movie?

Let’s put it this way: Visual Effects, Production Design, Costumes and Sound might be way better nomination bets.

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Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo

Directed by: Bong Joon Ho

Other: A Warner Bros. theatrical release. Rated R for drug use, language, sexual situations, violence. 137 minutes