Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
3/24/10
As longtime site readers
know, I'm a sucker for hardcore, R-rated sci-fi action flicks with themes
steeped in social commentary. I am, after all, the guy who put Gamer
on his 10-best list and gave The Condemned
four stars. As such, you'd think I'd be the ideal audience for Miguel
Sapochnik's Repo Men, centered around a future business that makes
predatory loans to sell the sick artificial organs at sky-high prices...
and then reclaims them with extreme prejudice when the customers can't
make the payments. Alas, Repo is a big ol' bundle of things
that don't work, starting with the way that concept manages to be a little
bit of everything without saying anything continuing with how not one of
the movie's action sequences generates thrills and finished off by a great
cast not one of whom gives a standout performance. Well, the movie
is truly finished off by the way it finishes, but we'll get to that after
the appropriate spoiler barricade. Suffice it to say, like the US
health care system it almost kinda seeks to satirize, Repo Men could
use a whole lot of reform.
It's The Future, and things
are not going so well (although we mostly need off-screen newscasts and
narrators to tell us so). One business that's booming, however, is
The Union, which sells artificial organs to the kind of people who used
to have to wait for their turn on that silly donor list. They're
expensive, REALLY expensive, but as Union bigwig Frank (Liev Schreiber)
assures his customers, he can easily work out a payment plan that fits
their lifestyle. And, if you should miss four payments, they'll just
take the organs back. This is done by Repo Men like Remy (Jude Law)
and Jake (Forest Whitaker), whose caring technique consists primarily of
shooting the indebted with tranquilizer darts and then cutting the organs
out, leaving the clients to die. Remy's wife Carol (Carice van Houten)
doesn't approve and pushes him to leave Repo and get into the lower-paying
but more regularly scheduled work of a sales rep. Jake, his childhood
friend, pushes right back, hoping to keep him working by his side.
But when Carol leaves, taking his son Peter (Chandler Canterbury) with
her, Remy makes his decision and vows to do just one last job. Alas,
it doesn't go well, and Remy awakens in the hospital with a brand new mechanical
heart and an easy payment plan. Only now, killing people and cutting
out their organs doesn't strike him as quite so cool: in fact, he
simply can't bring himself to do it and the bills pile up. When his
94 days are up, he and fellow deadbeat Beth (Alice Braga) must go on the
run to survive, with Jake in hot pursuit looking to reclaim The Union's
property.
Given the way its concept
combines the health, housing and immigration crises into one clean sci-fi
metaphor, it's really remarkable how little Repo Men manages to
say about any of them. Ultimately, the whole game of handing out
organs and then taking them back seems to be more an excuse for the movie
to show its heroes slicing people open than to make any kind of point.
And it DOES love to slice people open, ultimately never really wrapping
its brain around what's wrong with that clean through to a climax that
gruesomely uses surgery as a stand-in for sex in a way that's not nearly
as gross or (ewww) sexy as it thinks it is. And while it's slicing
and dicing extras, the movie has no time to ask the most basic questions
about The Union. Like, has there ever been a worse name for an evil
corporation? Even Organco would have been better. But more
to the point, do the organs really need to be so expensive? Obviously
charging people hundreds of thousands of dollars for life-saving technology
that costs hundreds of thousands to produce is a very different thing than
if each heart costs The Union $49.99. Frank alludes to the notion
that their real business is the usurious interest they charge, but if so,
could we get more than one line about that? And what about that organ
donor list that's also name-dropped once and never mentioned again.
Does it still exist? Again, it's a very different customer who chooses
to buy an organ he can't afford rather than wait for a chance to have one
donated than one who has no other options. After all, since it seems
like everyone in Repo Men's world has at least one Union organ,
the donor list should have gotten pretty short.
Which brings me to Repo
Men's second big problem, its choice of protagonists. Remy is
maddeningly passive, seemingly only in the Repo business because a childhood
bully/friend with a codependent headlock on him dragged him into it.
But he doesn't seem to have a single moral qualm about what he's doing,
looking to leave for sales only because his wife wants him to (and the
movie deems her a shrewish bitch for the audacity). Then, after he's
got a Union heart ticking inside him, Sapochnik, writers Eric Garcia and
Garrett Lerner and Law all manage to botch Remy's crisis of conscience,
making it instead seem like mere squeamishness while he passively sits
in Jake's apartment and waits for the past due notices to turn up in the
mailbox (what kind of bankrupt future is this, anyway, when your past due
notices still come in red envelopes?). He then falls for/in with
Beth, who lacks any kind of sympathetic hook of her own, being a drug addict
who's stocked up on all kinds of elective replacement parts she can't afford.
Maybe this plays differently in Hollywood, but eyes that automatically
change color are not worth risking your life for. Even her artificial
knees don't rise to that level where I'd tempt the Repo Men to do their
bloody work rather than walk with a cane. By this point, they're
both running because someone's chasing them, but even then Remy never grows
a true conscience and never tries to do anything to help anyone else.
Oh, I know what those who've already seen the movie might be thinking,
but that doesn't count for reasons we'll discuss on the other side of that
yellow Spoiler tape.
While heavy on the gore (although
not as heavy as the MPAA would have you think: much of the carnage
occurs off-screen), the show Sapochnik and his actors put on is light on
thrills because the action is poorly choreographed and performed.
A climactic fight between Remy and a dozen Repos is staged in old-school
Michael Dudikoff style: the men come at him one at a time, each waiting
for his predecessor to die before trying their luck. Although the
cast is chock-full of great actors, Law, Whittaker and Schreiber keep their
engines set to idle pretty much the whole time, and none of the movie's
women have anything to do but try to drag Remy kicking and screaming through
the paces of the plot.
How odd that a movie so passive
and dull for its first 100 minutes should go so stone-cold bonkers in the
final 10, and this is where I have to throw up the SPOILER WARNING*******
READ NO FURTHER OR A UNION MAN WILL SHOW UP AT YOUR DOOR AND TELL YOU HOW
REPO MEN ENDS******* Yeah, I get the whole “assault on the main
office” thing, even if it leads through that lame-o fight and that aforementioned
sick puppy mutual-surgery-as-sex scene that's as eye-rolling a resolution
to Remy and Beth's dilemma as possible. Until the final moments undo
it, these scenes even suggest Remy's come to look out for something other
than himself and his girlfriend. But then things just get ridiculous,
with things working themselves out with the happily-ever-after conviction
of a movie being written and directed by its own focus groups. And
as silly as these events are, they, like most of the movie's “surprises”,
can't possibly be fooling anyone who paid even a modicum of attention to
what's come before. HEL-LO! How can you get a machine that
allows the brain damaged to live out their days in a computer-controlled
dreamworld shoved in your face as hard as Repo Man shoves its in
the early scenes and not think “Great Shades of Shayamalan! This
movie's going to end with the revelation that its events have really happened
inside that computer!”? Seriously? Not that if what happens
on that beach at the very end came as a true surprise it would be any more
satisfying: Repo Men may be the first movie ever to follow
a self-destructively awful ending with a self-destructively awful twist,
since Remy's final fate doesn't bring the plot to an entertaining close
OR say a thing about health care, the housing crisis, predatory lending,
national bankruptcy or immigrants' rights. It's a simple “look at
me!” twist trick, and not a very good one. *******END OF SPOILERS*******
I'd be remiss to close without
pointing out that Repo Men is built around a framing structure that
gives Dennis Quaid's one-day walk from Washington DC to New York City in
The Day After Tomorrow a run for its preposterous money. Remy
relates the story's events to us through a book he's written called "The
Repossession Mambo": while they're being stalked by Jake, we see
he and Beth find a typewriter in the trash, then watch him type away for
a period that couldn't possibly last more than a few hours and come up
with a thick manuscript that's bound and ready for publication by the movie's
end. Absurd? Well, I don't know, perhaps we should ask co-writer
Garcia, on whose book "The Repossession Mambo" the film is based, how long
it took to write. The enthusiasm with which the film waves that tome
in our faces took me back to those moments at the end of old Voyagers!
episodes where Meeno Peluce and Jon-Erik Hexum would remind us that if
we thought Genghis Khan was cool when he met the Wright Brothers, wait
until we got down to our local library and read all about him. "The
Resurrection Mambo"! Fail to read it at your peril!
OK, now I'm just getting
loopy, but Repo Men is the kind of movie that does that to you,
failing to get all but the most basic watchability out of a very promising
cast and concept. The viewer is left to either count the tiles on
the theater ceiling or to ask questions like “If the country's bankrupt,
how can everyone afford to buy all these organs?” To which the movie
would answer, “They can't, silly, that's what the hacksaws are for.” |
