The Good: Initial idea is not a bad one.
The Bad: The idea was recently done, Stiff acting, Excessive gore and violence.
The Basics: Hugely disappointing, Repo Men is a thriller too predictable to be thrilling set in a world where overpriced organs are violently repossessed by thuggish repo men.
I've had it with horror movies for a while, I think. Earlier this year, I went to a lot of premieres and I found myself hoping that I'm not invited to more horror flicks for a while. That feeling came on the heels of my screening Repo Men, a film which lived up to all my worst fears of what it could be based on the previews. But more than a horror film, Repo Men was a psychologically-driven thriller, somewhat like Shudder Island in terms of depth. As such, Repo Men follows in the current trend of horror movies not being particularly scary. In fact, it is almost hard to call this a horror movie at all: it's a fairly-gory action-adventure film where some upsetting things happen in between battle scenes and people running.
As for the other aspect, when I started seeing the preview trailers for Repo Men, I thought the premise looked familiar, which it did. My wife had just had me watch Repo! The Genetic Opera (click here for that review) and, as one might suspect, the concepts are remarkably close. But where Repo! The Genetic Opera earned my respect for being both stylish in its presentation, clever in its concept and surprisingly smart, Repo Men is just the opposite. This cheap gore-flick is stark and anything but artistic, clearly derivative and obvious to the point of being dumb at some key moments.
Remy is a repo man for The Union, a medical conglomerate that specializes in artificial internal organs. While he usually works free-lance, he has a de facto partner, Jake, and they repossess organs that people have failed to keep up their payments on. Unfortunately for Remy, Remy was attacked while on the job and is only alive thanks to a Union artificial heart and the terms of payment have left him unable to keep up. Not willing to rip out his own heart, Remy goes on the run as his bills mount. Left by his wife, Carol, and pressured by his boss Frank, Remy tries to put his life back together.
His search for redemption and freedom takes him to Beth and an underground of people on the run from the Union as well. As Remy becomes what he used to hunt, Jake is forced to hunt him and as the two men move toward a final showdown, Remy and Beth make desperate inroads to end the Union itself.
And I don't care. Repo Men had an unbearable lack of connection for me as a viewer that I didn't care who lived, who died and whether or not Remy had his heart ripped out or if he actually thwarted Jake. The gore comes up so quickly and with such force that it actually made me queasy. And it wasn't a good queasy, like being uncomfortable because I had witnessed something clever, but unsettling. I was nauseous because the graphic nature of the movie and how classless it was presented; it made me feel classless to sit and watch people get torn apart for The Union. There's nothing entertaining about a film where one feels ashamed to continue to sit through the screening of it!
The excessive gore is a great example of how Repo Men is more gaudy than stylish. While Repo! The Genetic Opera played with the color palate and added music to mute the gore and play with the audience, Repo Men is not so kind. Instead, it is presented with a stark color palate with fast movement and quick cuts which only accent the bloody reveals. The only positive note one might have about this is that many of the disembowelings look realistic. This is utterly unsettling, but after the first few repossessions, one begins to feel that the footage of what The Union and Remy does is more for shock value and that The Union makes artificial organs because it looks cooler to have mechanical constructs ripped out of people.
As one might suspect, Repo Men is derivative in its story as well. Based upon his novel, Eric Garcia wrote the screenplay for Repo Men with Garrett Lerner and, unfortunately, they don't seem to have a fresh idea between them. Repo Men is the cinematic equivalent of pulp, with quick reversals, people running and incredible fight scenes. The martial art of choice here is kali, which Remy employs in trying to defend himself from Jake. It's no surprise that Jake tries to get inside Remy's head by virtue of being his former partner and his use by Frank as Remy's boss is no surprise either. Repo Men follows an unfortunately formulaic plot for a chase film with its predictably timed reversals, moments where Remy must weigh his humanity versus his own survival and revelations of Jake. The movie is not terribly scary, as moments when Jake jumps out to attack are so predictable and choreographed that the audience sees them coming a mile off. And, yes, the basic idea of a massive corporation dealing in internal organs and violently repossessing them was done in Repo! The Genetic Opera.
Sadly, Repo Men does not lift arguably the best aspect of Repo! The Genetic Opera, which was that film's Shakespearean nature. Repo! The Genetic Opera is arguably a twisted rewrite of Shakespeare's King Lear and it works beautifully as that. But Repo Men is nothing so smart. It's like a rather dumb rewrite of Crank and the fast paced nature of Remy going from one incident on the run to another feels more like that than anything better.
Part of the problem, no doubt, comes from director Miguel Sapochnik, who cuts the film together like a television commercial. The fight sequences, especially, are frenetic and have the feeling of being a video game or a Mountain Dew commercial on fast forward more than cohesive or even stylish. But Sapochnik was dealt a bad hand. First, the Garcia and Lerner script lacks a protagonist who is terribly empathetic or even smart. Remy is a Repo Man, he knows how bad the terms of The Union are; he enforces them! We are meant to believe that in his hour of greatest need, The Union used him and Remy agreed because he has a son and wife he simply cannot bear to part with. What, Remy never thought ahead and made an arrangement with the Union in case of emergency? He never thought to work a health plan into his last contract negotiation?!
No and the audience doesn't expect that he would. The reason for this is that Remy is played by the chronically-stiff Jude Law. The audience comes to figure Remy never thought "Duh, gee, if I repossess all these there purdy organs, if I ever get in with th' Union, they could send someone after me!" because Law never seems terribly imaginative in the role. He is coldly brutish and unsympathetic. But what is most problematic about his performance is that he fails to sell the moments which would convince the viewer that he cares about his son and loves his wife, Carol. Law has absolutely no on-screen chemistry with Carice Van Houten and his on-screen relationship with Beth is more plot formulaic than actually chemistry or character driven.
Liev Schreiber is fairly bland and monolithic as Frank and only Forest Whitaker holds his own as Jake. But even Whitaker is not given much to work with and he soon becomes a monolithic villain as the enforcer for the Union.
Now on DVD and Blu-Ray, Repo Men arrives with an additional eight minutes of footage reinserted into the film to make it a little more edgy than the original. Bafflingly, there are still deleted scenes. The DVD also features a commentary track and commercials for The Union. There is also a featurette on the visual effects, but none of these make the film any more palatable to those who didn't enjoy the source material.
In the end, Repo Men suffers dramatically because the viewer does not care about any of the characters and the story feels like what it is; a half-rate action-adventure film trying to masquerade as original based on a simple idea that had been presented in a much better way recently.
For other, similar, films, please check out my reviews of:
Gamer
Brazil
Blade: Trinity
3/10
For other film reviews, be sure to check out my index page by clicking here!
© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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