Country: USA / Canada
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Direction: Miguel Sapochnik
Cast: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga, Liev Schreiber
In the future humans have extended and improved our lives through highly sophisticated and expensive mechanical organs created by a company called "The Union". The dark side of these medical breakthroughs is that if you don't pay your bill, "The Union" sends its highly skilled repo men to take back its property... with no concern for your comfort or survival. Former soldier Remy is one of the best organ repo men in the business. But when he suffers a cardiac failure on the job, he awakens to find himself fitted with the company's top-of-the-line heart-replacement... as well as a hefty debt. But a side effect of the procedure is that his heart's no longer in the job. When he can't make the payments, The Union sends its toughest enforcer, Remy's former partner Jake, to track him down.
Download Repo Men (2010)
Movie Review:
Repo Men, directed by Miguel Sapochnik, is a bloody, grim sci-fi thriller that heads off into outrageous action and near-satire levels of goofy for its final act. It tells the story of a future world where artificial organs can be purchased on lease, with recipients contracted to pay for them in total by the end of 3 months. If you happen to fail at the last part, the Union's (the company providing the organs) repo-men will show up at your door, stun you, and then quickly and efficiently remove the merchandise.
Law plays one of these repo men, Remy, who comes into contact with Beth, a young woman whose body turns out to be mostly rent-to-own organs. Remy has a pretty expensive piece of biological installation himself, and when it comes down to making the decision to repo Beth or go on the run, he chooses the latter. Because, without that, there's no movie.
As it turns out, there's barely any movie anyway. Although it pains me to point this out, Repo Men, in addition to appropriating the title of Alex Cox's 1980's cult film, has also lifted wholesale the plot of 2008's Repo: The Genetic Opera!, minus of course the musical interludes and the neon tacky future sets. The rest of the picture is a cut and paste job of other science fiction faves, like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Equilibrium.
A sequence where Law and Braga open each other up (in the surgical sense) in order to destabilize the bar codes on their hijacked parts is reminiscent of Law's own scenes in A.I, with Gigolo Joe removing his make and model number, and existenZ, where Dafoe helps Law's hacker install a painful ‘bioport' into his back. By the end, where Remy is storming the Union with all manner of sharp and deadly weapons, we are fully into Matrix territory and I noticed my check-off list was complete.
If you were to repossess this movie's stolen parts, there wouldn't be anything left but a handful of good performances gasping for breath in a pool of half-written ideas. And yet, that's entirely too harsh on my part, because I did have a certain amount of fun with Repo Men. It helps if you are a sci-fi junkie, and did enjoy those movies I've previously mentioned. Repo Men glides so willingly along that it's easy to allow it an extension on its rental of the borrowed bits just to see where it's going. With Law redesigning his image and giving us a new way to perceive him-as masculine movie hero- there's something to focus on, and with Forest Whittaker playing his partner Jake, and Braga as his charge, the movie has a solid emotional base.
What it lacks is any kind of ambition. This one is pure mindless entertainment, but it excels in that regard. I was never bored, never terribly concerned by the plot holes on screen, and when the turn of the screw comes for Law's character, I bought it. In a time when half the action movies going don't give us anyone of note to root for, it's nice to see a picture where there are several interesting characters.
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