Repo Men Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 03.21.2010

A film desperately in need of heart and brain transplants

Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik
Written by: Garrett Lerner & Eric Garcia

Starring:
Jude Law - Remy
Forest Whitaker - Jake
Alice Braga - Beth
Carice Van Houten - Carol
Liev Schreiber - Frank
Chandler Canterbury - Peter
RZA - T-Bone



Running Time: 111 minutes
Rated R for for strong bloody violence, grisly images, language and some sexuality/nudity.

Organ repossession films are all the rage these days, it seems. Okay, perhaps that's not an entirely accurate statement; truth be told, there have only been two. The first was Darren Lynn Bousman's Saw-meets-Rocky Horror Picture Show musical Repo! The Genetic Opera. Produced by Lionsgate and shorted out of a solid theatrical run, the bloody affair found its audience on DVD. Surprisingly, it is not the only film to cover this topic. At the same time as Repo was filming, author Eric Garcia was writing Repossession Mambo. Covering the same basic plot points as the film that was in production, the book found film rights before it was published, as Garcia collaborated with Garrett Lerner and Miguel Sapochnik on the novel. Universal Studios picked up the film and, with Jude Law and Forest Whitaker attached to star, the film went into production in 2007 and after a lengthy post-production process, it finally has its chance to find theatrical success where its predecessor failed.

The film is set a nebulous amount of time in the future, where the world economy had collapsed but has apparently been rebuilt, at least in the United States. In this new future, technological advances has made it possible to have advanced bio-robotic organs rather than risk organ replacement that the body might reject. These artificial organs, called artiforges, are owned by a giant corporation known as The Union, and people needing--or just wanting--them can buy them. If they can't afford the price, then no problem...as the salesman and local Union facility supervisors like Frank (Schreiber) say, they can find a financing plan that works for them. "You owe it to yourself," Frank says. "You owe it to your family."

Of course, if you fall behind, that's when the titular characters come into play. After ninety days and a final notice, The Union sends Repo Men out to collect on their property, designated by a tattoo on their neck and armed with stun guns and surgical kits. The best of these Repo Men is Remy (Law). Working alongside his lifelong friend and partner Jake (Whitaker), Remy consistently racks up an impressive collection (and correspondingly, body) count and has gotten his routine down perfectly. When he walks down the street, people give him a wide berth out of fear and respect. But his wife Carol (Van Houten) doesn't approve of his vocation, and wants him to move to sales for the better hours and lack of killing people. When a last job nearly kills him due to a faulty defibrillator, Remy finds himself forced into being fitted with an artificial heart.

One he's back to health, he tries to go back on the job, but finds that he can't kill people for their organs now that he's one of them. Jake tries to help in his own way, but soon enough Remy has to go on the run. He encounters a woman named Beth (Braga), who has ten separate artiforges, all insanely past due, and the two begin to grow close as they try to escape their fates. Can they evade Frank's army of Repo Men--Remy's former co-workers--and maybe even change the way the world runs in an era where falling behind on your credit payments can be fatal?

As said before, Repo Men is written by Lerner amd Garcia, based on Garcia's novel Repossession Mambo. The movie's concept and plot has obvious similarities to 2008's Repo! The Genetic Opera, although the filmmakers claim that the projects were developed independently and without foreknowledge of each other. Whether that's the case or not, the similarities will leave these two films inextricably linked. Lerner's script is a more straight-forward, less kitschy affair than the film that beat it to the box office, and instead of going over the top it plays things as a straight science-fiction thriller. The problem is that with the garish flushed out, so also went most of the gallows humor. The inherently satirical concept of Repo Men is more naturally inclined toward morbid laughs, and the more serious the script gets, the less enjoyable it becomes. It doesn't help that Lerner more or less telegraphs every plot twist well in advance. When Jake mentions a new type of enhancement earlier in the film, we know that it will become important later because it's brought up out of the blue and dropped just as quickly, about as subtly as a jackhammer. Similarly, when Remy and Jake are sitting in a bar after work and the singer catches Remy's eye, we know she'll be important later, probably as a romantic interest. And indeed she is, for she is Beth. It's all just too obvious and carried out without enough wit to make it all work.

Meanwhile, Lerner has a ways to go before he understands how to write characters in films. The writer has served as a producer and writer on TV's House, and while snippets of character development are fine on an episode-by-episode basis, the same amount doesn't hold up within a self-contained two-hour film. No character is given more than a brief outline for history outside of Remy and Jake, and even the back stories for characters are handled in less than five minutes of time. They also don't follow along any particular path outside of what the plot drives them into. There are a few particular plot contrivances that serve as twists, though these are more to try and surprise the viewer than actually build any development. Either way, it fails at doing either.

It's unfortunate that the script is as poor as it is, because it wastes a very good cast. Jude Law can do very well given the right roles; he has proven that in many previous films. Here, he has little to work with as Remy. Leonardo DiCaprio was originally attached to the role and it's not hard to see why the actor left the project; few people could have done much with a lead role as limited as this. Law is relegated to trying to become a near-sociopathic tough guy who discovers his humanity post-implant; the role seems built more for a Jason Statham/Gerard Butler type. Law handles the action scenes fine and adds gravity to the moral challenges he faces when he can no longer do his job, but he can only rise so far above the material. Forest Whitaker goes a bit too over-the-top during much of the film, and by doing so he clashes with the dour nature of the material. He has a solid dynamic with Law and they work fine against each other, but when it comes to the more emotionally-charged scenes the Oscar-winning actor comes off like he was expecting the film to go straight to video. Liev Schreiber delivers an uneven performance that pops at times but falls flat at others, and Alice Braga largely resorts to being little more than a stock girlfriend role with a few extra twists. She is likable, but the role requires more than just that to succeed.

The biggest fault of this film, however, lies in the direction and art direction. Love or hate it, Repo! The Genetic Opera had style and a sense of fun to it. Miguel Sapochnik's feature film directorial debut has him setting the film in a sterile, lifeless world. There are a few camera angles that come off interesting and Sapochnik builds a bit of tension from time to time, but visually this film is indistinguishable from the superior Daywalkers or a host of other futuristic dystopias. The affluent world of the haves is washed out and sanitized, while the world of the have-nots is dirty and life generally stinks. It is the same color spectrum and camera style that we've seen before. The muted color palette sucks the life out of the film, making the splashes of gore that Sapochnik seems to enjoy all the more stark. This works in making the red blood stand out, but splashes of red in a joyless film don't make for enjoyment. Blood, or any artistic choice or production design, should inspire some kind of emotion or meaning. In this case, Sapochnik seems interested only in making the blood fly for the purposes of blood flying. There's no horror to it, no thrill and no fun.

There are two places where that flaw lifts. The first is a particular come-uppance late in the film, and that is fun to see. The second is, perhaps, the only truly lurid part of the film. Despite the presence of nudity, drug abuse and of course violence, the film seems particularly stale until a moment when, out of nowhere, Sapochnik decides to appeal to the niche audience of surgery fetishists. Without spoiling the scene, simply allow me to say that the sexually-charged nature of this climactic scene is completely out of place with the rest of the film. It's more suited to a film like David Cronenberg's Crash, where it worked better because the movie around it was geared toward it. Here, it just inspires laughs at how disjointed it is in the context of the movie.

The end of the film features a twist that is both obvious and silly, and renders much of the last act pointless. It's too bad, because outside of the surgery fetishist scene, it is where the movie truly comes alive by virtue of recognizing how outlandish the plot is and just going with that. But ultimately this is a movie that tries to be a straight sci-fi thriller without having anything new to bring to the table. A plot like this is rife with the possibility for social satire and commentary; here we get some feather-light jabs at financing companies and people's tendency to get themselves in over their head when taking on debt is concerned. Anything else is completely passed by, and that makes the film as artificial as the organs that inhabit its characters.

The 411: There was a lot of potential in Repo Men, Miguel Sapochnik's directorial debut that is based on the novel Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia. Unfortunately, that potential is wasted on generic characters, a stock look for the genre, and a tone that takes itself far too seriously. Any chance for quality is quickly drained away by the contrived and overwrought plot. The acting by Jude Law is good and Liev Schreiber and Alice Braga add a tiny bit of credibility to their paper-thin characters, but Forest Whitaker performance is uneven and misfires big time in some scenes. The lack of any sense of fun or social commentary kills the film's chances and leaves it falling flat, with only a few isolated scenes of humor--intentional and unintentional--to entertain. For as much as it seems to want to be the successful organ repossession movie, it falls before it's sole brethren in that category by a long shot and ends up as nothing more than a generic sci-fi actioner with extra blood.

Final Score:  4.5   [ Poor ]