As part of a mission to colonise an ice planet in the year 2050, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to be an “Expendable” without reading the terms and conditions. Did Kelsey Grammer teach him nothing?

Not only does he not get to meet Sylvester Stallone, Mickey has volunteered to be a lab rat who gets repeatedly killed and then cloned with the same memories, which is bad news for a man who has been in five Twilight movies. As Mickey 17 is about to be eaten by giant space bugs, writer/director Bong Joon Ho flashes back to how he got there. This 30-minute pre-titles sequence has a great sense of direction, headed purposefully towards the start of the film, with an offbeat comedy to its flashback style that almost reads as a tech noir directed by Wes Anderson.

But Mickey 17 gets as lost as the title character when the plot catches up with itself, and a sense of randomness sets in, as though Bong Joon Ho is making the story up as he goes along. The Korean director packs a lot in, combining Moon-like clone sci-fi with Starship Troopers satire and romantic elements, while returning to the themes of class and animal rights from Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite. But he fails to bring those various ideas together in a satisfying way, and leans into its chaotic cartoon energy to the point that it becomes hard to care about the outcome.

Pattinson does a brilliant job holding the film together in a dual role, although it is unclear why one of the Mickeys has such a different personality to the others. Less impressive is Mark Ruffalo doing an unfunny Trump impression as an egomaniacal politician, similar to his pantomime performance in Poor Things, both cases of miscasting for such a gifted naturalistic actor. This leaves most of the movie’s comedic weight resting on the shoulders of Tim Key dressed in a giant pigeon costume, and while he is more than up to the task, there is sadly only one of him.