"Can we have your liver?"
Repo Men takes us to a dystopian future where the economy and health care still sucks. The film was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, making his feature-length debut, working from a script by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner. The screenplay was based on a novel by Garcia called Repossession Mambo. Repo Men bares several striking similarities to the Gothic rock opera, Repo! The Genetic Opera, which began life as a stage show.
Jude Law and Forest Whitaker star as Remy and Jake, a pair of repo men working for the Union. The monolithic corporation has created state-of-the-art artificial organs (artiforgs) which it provides to the public on a seemingly easy installment plan. What their lead salesman, Frank (Liev Schreiber), fails to tell his clients is that the repo men will cut the organs out of you should you fail to miss a payment. Remy is the Union’s top repo man, but he has a change of heart (literally) when a malfunctioning defibrillator lands him in the hospital in need of a new ticker. Now possessing an artiforg of his own, Remy can no longer continue his line of work in good conscience. He descends into the lower rungs of society as a fugitive along with Beth (Alice Braga), a sultry nightclub singer with an assortment of artiforgs and cybernetic upgrades. A jilted Jake, who seems to have an obsessive bromantic attachment to his partner,
There’s also a perfunctory subplot involving Remy’s son and estranged wife, played by Carice van Houten in a thoroughly thankless role.
Repo Men had the makings of a decent action flick with two very dependable actors in the lead roles. Instead, the filmmakers seem more than happy to tread water with an utterly unoriginal production. Repo Men references (or rips off, depending on your POV) numerous movies which only serves to remind you just how inferior it really is in comparison. Their look of the future cribs Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, the offices of the Union are right out of THX-1138 and Brazil, and there’s even a bizarre nod to David Cronenberg’s Crash. Worst of all, Repo Men also features the umpteenth knockoff of the famed hallway fight from Oldboy. In an advanced era of technology, it doesn’t make much sense for people to fight each other with meat cleavers and steak knives. On the other hand, there is a sly nod to the organ donor skit from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, a likely inspiration. That may have more to do with Monty Python’s sheer awesomeness than Repo Men.
Jude Law has starred in several underrated sci-fi films like Gattaca, eXistenZ (another of Cronenberg’s), and Spielberg’s oft-maligned A.I. Repo Men cannot be considered one of them. It isn’t underrated, just undeserving. Undeserving of its great cast and undeserving of anyone’s time.
Rating: *½
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