In a time when home repossession rates are at their highest in ages, you could say it’s natural to ask the question, “What else could be at stake?” What if not just your home, car, or financed furniture could be repossessed? What if, in some strange twist of legislation, financiers had the legal right to kill in the name of repossession. Therein lies the premise of Repo Men, a film about bounty hunters seeking not the people themselves but mechanical organs somewhere within them. You don’t need to have passed anatomy in high school to guess that having your artificial heart plucked from your body in the middle of your living room floor will most likely be fatal; the Repo Men might not kill you when they reclaim that kidney with payments three months overdue, but the blood loss might. Needless to say, the profession and the legislation that allows it has no qualms about death as a side effect of commerce.
Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) work as Repo Men for The Union, the country’s largest supplier of Artiforgs (an ugly portmanteau of “artificial” and “organs”). The travel about snatching back organs from beatnik account holders who’ve long since realized that the company’s affordable finance plan is anything but. In those dire seconds when your family must consider between leaving you to die in the hospital bed or saving your life by implanting a badly needed Artiforg, the latter option seems like the humane one. Although, when you consider the person will most likely be killed in the reclamation process three months later by a Repo Man, the move looks more like denial than salvation.
But the Repo Men don’t care about that. They know the system they work under; they know the organs they’re reclaiming have arrived on their pink sheet because ordinary shmos can’t afford these medical wonders. The Union bleeds them dry of money while they can pay, then take back the lifeline a few months later on default. The people must be deadbeats, the Repo Men surmise. Remy shares that opinion. Or he did. Until an accident on the job finds him the owner of an Artiforg heart himself. With inevitable debt looming in the future, he loses taste for the Repo Man biz and begins to sympathize with his common man – who quickly become his only allies when he two defaults on the Artiforg payments and goes on the lam, evading other Repo Men and his former parter Jake.
Think of it like Minority Report, but with a lot more surgery. That’s what it is really. It’s virtually the same story, with a paradigm shifted here or there. Like Tom Cruise, Law plays a devoted company man whose loyalty turns out to be unwarranted when the force he once swore to uphold turns its back on him. In what the writers certainly must have considered brilliant ironic symbolism, those who have machine parts turn out to be much more “human” than any of their persecuting Repo Men.
Law and Whitaker make do with a decent rapport, but it’s Union boss Liev Schreiber who provides the most entertaining performance. Law’s narration has a few witty barbs, but otherwise it’s a cheap trick to help keep the audience caught up with a story whose “twists” require a lot of leeway (and voluntary blindness on the part of the viewer). Alice Braga stars as Law’s streetwise, mostly mechanical escapee Beth – whose surgical implants prove to be as much for necessity as cheap gags.
To Repo Men’s definite credit, it’s one of the few movies of its type that goes out of its way to bring on the gore. It almost reaches horror movie levels with the amount of gratuitous blood they throw about, but then it is a movie whose plot is based in forced surgery. No matter which way you slice it, someone’s gonna bleed. And lots of someones do.
It’s good Sci-Fi fun, but a great film it’s not. You’ll be entertained but it’s nothing that’ll have you ushering friends in for a second or third viewing.
"Repo Men" opens March 19, 2010 and is rated R. Action, Sci-Fi. Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Written by Eric Garcia & Garrett Lerner (screenplay), Eric Garcia (novel). Starring Alice Braga, Carice Van Houten, Forest Whitaker, Jude Law, Liev Schreiber, RZA.
