Repo Men Fails to Deliver the Goods
Remy (Jude Law) is the best at what he does, and what he does is repossess artificial organs manufactured by multibillion dollar international biomedical company The Union when the people carrying them become delinquent paying their bills. With little fanfare and even less chitchat he knocks people out and, while they’re unconscious, removes his employer’s property promptly returning it to his boss Frank (Liev Schreiber) leaving his victims at death’s door.
Forest Whitaker and Jude Law in Universal Pictures' Repo Men
But when his wife Carol (Carice van Houten) gives him an ultimatum to quit working repo or risk losing both her and their son Peter (Chandler Canterbury) forever Remy decides to go on one last job before turning in his scalpel and moving into a Union sales desk. That job, however, is anything but typical, a freak accident leaving shorting out his heart forcing him to enter into a deal with the devil he intimately knows for a new one.
His marriage in shambles, Remy moves in with best friend and fellow repo impresario Jake (Forest Whitaker) to try and get his life moving in the right direction again. Only problem, his heart is no longer in his job, an irony not lost on either him or his new roommate. Making matters worse, he’s starting to become delinquent in his payments, and with time running out Remy seems more interested in spending time Beth (Alice Braga), a Union debtor whose organs are more artificial than not, then he is in getting his finances back in order.
Based on the novel The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia (who also penned the screenplay with Garrett Lerner), if Miguel Sapochnik’s futuristic science fiction B-movie morality play Repo Men sounds a little bit familiar than you might be one of the few who actually saw Darren Lynn Bousman’s cult rock opera Repo! The Genetic Opera. To say the two films share a bit in common would be a massive understatement. To say neither lives up to their intriguing, thought-provoking and highly gruesome premise would be an even bigger one.
But where I outright loathed (save for the great Anthony Stewart Head’s inventive performance) Bousman’s barely released 2008 effort, Sapochnik’s comes just close enough to being a winning effort I’m sort of tempted to give it a slight pass. Thanks to its superlative cast Repo Men is consistently engaging on a multitude of levels, and where that earlier musical effort failed to do much with its premise other then to drown things in gore this one offers up just enough food for thought it at times surpasses its genre roots to become something a tiny bit more.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers treat things with such deathly seriousness the whole thing tends to drag creating an air of overly familiar boredom difficult to get past. On top of that, it tends to repeat itself to the point it plays a little like a broken record, characters going in such roundabout circles I started to get a little dizzy watching them spin. Worst of all, Garcia and Lerner’s screenplay telegraphs its moves with such overt obviousness I knew what was going to happen every step of the way, even a final “twist” so unsurprising (and uninspiring) I almost openly yawned during its delivery.
Blade Runner and Metropolis influences aside, it must be noted that David Sandefur’s (Journey to the Center of the Earth) is pretty fantastic, as is Enrique Chediak’s (28 Weeks Later) Matrix meets The Dark Knight style cinematography. The fight sequences are staged with flash and flair, and while they’re not anything we haven’t seen before the jolt of blood-splattered energy they manage to deliver is just good enough to make their over familiarity not matter as much as it probably should.
In the end, though, I just wasn’t wowed enough by either the performances, all of which are solid, or the aforementioned technical bits to be okay with how tedious and routine much of the plotting sadly is. The film never delivers on the grotesque deviousness of its concept, instead treating everything with such sacrosanct seriousness frankly I was bored by it all. Repo Men never went for the jugular, delivering instead a couple of paper cuts before fading away into blasé nothingness.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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