A movie like Repo Men was bound to surface sooner or later. During these tough economic times where people are getting kicked out of their homes or having to give up on certain things because they cannot afford them anymore has given Repo Men a great idea. You can’t pay for your house? The bank takes it. You can’t pay for that car? The bank takes it. You can’t pay for the artificial organs in your body? Well that is where the Repo Men come in to take them back.
Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) are repo men for a company named The Union. This takes place in the future, possibly in the near future. Who knows. And Remy and Jake are very good at their job. Remy is the best organ repo man. This changes after he suffers a cardiac failure during his last repo. So he gets a top-of-the-line artificial heart without his knowledge or consent.
All Remy has to do is get back on his feet and start reposing again to pay off his heart. The only problem is he cannot do it anymore. I guess you could say he has had a change of heart. Get it? But he does start to have emotions that he didn’t have before. He starts to care. So The Union’s best repo man fails to pay for his heart, and soon Jake, his best friend and former partner, must take his heart back. The repo man for The Union becomes one of their clients. The hunter becomes the hunted.
Repo Men has a great concept and the beginning has a good pace and is interesting. However, the longer the movie goes, the more it starts to lose what it had going for it. About the time Remy gets his new heart is when the story starts to slow down and fails to keep your attention. It hits a wall before the first hour or so. The movie wants to present this new idea, but use violence and blood to get the point across. And it just simply does not work.
This movie has a lot of carving into bodies and tons of blood. I guess we should expect that, but it just does not stop. When you think it’s over, we return to it. Eventually, all of the cutting, stabbing, and carving gets old and it’s unnecessary.
There is also a romance in the movie and I never bought it starting from the moment they met. Beth (Alice Braga) is a singer, but also is addicted to drugs and lives on the streets. Remy decides he is going to help her after only seeing her once at a club and their romance blossoms. Beth’s body is mostly all artificial and is past due as well. Remy and Beth are both outlaws and are running from The Union. But their romance is rushed and comes across as completely fake.
Repo Men really tries to be a good futuristic action thriller. But that terrific idea is just not well-executed by director Miguel Sapochnik. You find yourself hoping for more, but you never receive it. You hope it stays interesting and keeps your attention. You hope there is more to the movie than just blood-spilling, and you hope that Jake and Remy have their final showdown. But you never get any of it. Well you do get a little bit out of one scenario but not much.
Law and Whitaker are not bad in the movie. We know they are talented actors, but Repo Men is not about the performances. It is about the action sequences and blood. Some are fun while others are disappointing or just flat-out annoying. But Law and Whitaker do what they can with what they have.
Now there is one person who does a lot with the little bit he has. Liev Schreiber plays Remy and Jake’s boss at The Union. He is so good at playing the bad guy. He is such a prick but you cannot help but smile when he says a snarky remark. You can tell he is all business and does not care about anything but money. And he will do what it takes to make a profit off people’s misfortunes.
Even if it means taking an organ back and letting a person die on the floor in a pool of their own blood. And yes you get to see this exact thing I just described in the movie. Spoiler alert.
Brandon Vick is a member of The Music City Film Critics’ Association and the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the resident film critic of the SoBros Network, and the star of The Vick’s Flicks Podcast. Follow him on Twitter @SirBrandonV and be sure to search #VicksFlicks for all of his latest movie reviews.
Check out the SoBros Shop. Become a Patron. Give us money for no reason. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter @SoBrosNetwork. Watch on YouTube.
