Repossess This! --- New Hearts and Minds, plus Livers, Kidneys, Spleens etc…

Harvesting Organs Reduces Repo Men to the Sum of its Bloody Parts
by
Morgan P Salvo


Sharing nothing in common with Alex Cox’s 1984 punk-rock-crazy Repo Man and more aligned with Darren Lynn Bousman’s 2008 Repo!: The Genetic Opera, this Repo Men has some wit, violence and gore, but also some problems. Like Saw VI this is provides commentary on the current health care debate, mainly that health care reform requires extreme sacrifice.

Repo Men introduces us to the future with a news voice over montage of how things came to be: global recession, fifth stage of war in Nigeria, technological breakthroughs. A corporation called “The Union” manufactures technologically sophisticated artificial organs, or “artiforgs", marketed and sold to gullible customers at exorbitant prices. The down side lies in the fine print that if payments aren’t made, hot-shot repo men are sent to violently cut open and yank out whatever organ has been replaced fatally reclaiming it with no concern for resulting pain or death. The twist comes when Remy (Jude Law), one of The Union’s best repo men, suffers cardiac failure on the job and, thereby awakens with a new gizmo for a heart and a huge debt to pay. The irony is that with his new heart he finds difficulty doing his job - let’s say his heart’s just not in it. When he can’t make payments the bulk of the movie follows Remy on the run from the corporation he used to work for and then predictably Remy’s former partner and best friend Jake (Forest Whitaker) is sent to track him down.

Resembling Blade Runner’s futuristic world and scratching the surface of Robocop’s sense of humor via billboard ads and commercials it’s actually more of a run of the mill stereotypical-buddy-cop-action movie; you know the kind where they would lay down their life for each other and their competitive spirit makes wives jealous. Repo Men is stranded somewhere between Freebie and the Bean and Logan’s Run
Director Miguel Sapochnik takes us on a slow journey only to liven it up with flying bullets, blood spewing, and some wacky punch-fests, all which seem to be derived from a myriad of better movies. One nice touch was an old-school fight scene between Whitaker and Law, without a ton of jump cuts and speeding camera angles. Sapochnik delivers a high-tech future reality juxtaposed against decay and colonies of non-paying passed-due account organ holders hiding in abandoned warehouses and squalor. Interspersed throughout there are also at least three decent scenes. Sounding like David Bowie crooning over clinically blood soaked images the musical score uses weird rock to enhance certain unbelievably tedious scenes like the gory-blood-letting stomach-churning body-part scanning love scene near the end.
Law gets close to being tough and vulnerable at the same time, but as an action hero? He seems to have fun as a mean, buff macho-dude, but it’s hard to buy his kick-ass tough guy. His knife-wielding killing machine is downright laughable. Alice Braga (City of God) as Remy’s love interest only slightly pulls off the task of being sexy, homeless and bionic. Whitaker is cuddly-yet-murderous, but we know he can do this kind of nice-guy-with-hidden-emotional-baggage in his sleep. Carice van Houten (Black Book) as Remy’s wife is reduced by a poor script into being nothing but a hateful bitch. And Liev Shreiber, once again a cartoonish villain, hams it up as the CEO of The Union.
Repo could succeed if it wasn’t all over the map. Too many questions arise, like, “If he gained a conscience along with the new heart why then does he kill more people?” With a laundry list of discrepancies and a narration containing a zillion holes, the ridiculous twist ending eradicates most of what you’ve been watching, diminishing it into an entirely different concept. The almost redeemable ending has us understand why it didn’t make any sense for so long. If Repo Men followed its instincts there was real potential to join the ranks of Blindness and District 9. Missing the opportunity to have fun with all recent political implications and coming off as a generic fable is bewildering. Action thriller or social satire, what this flick needs is a celluloid bionic makeover or better yet, to be repossessed.

Repo Men
Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Shreiber, Alice Braga
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
2 stars