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Written by: Ian Markowitz
In Repo Men, when customers fall 90 days behind on the payments for their artiforgs, as they are likely to do with a body part which costs $600,000, Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forrest Whitaker) are sent by their company, The Union, to go repossess the organs overdue for payment.
Repo Men is a movie which sends you on a wild ride blowing through virtually every movie cliché while at the end feeling empty and unmoved. Set in a futuristic world, the movie portrays Whitaker and Law as men who repossess artificial organs, or artiforgs in the movie, from customers who are past due on their payments for the exorbitantly expensive artiforgs.
Since the organs are so expensive, virtually everyone enrolls in a payment plan for the organs to have more time with their families, regardless of whether or not they are able to afford them. As a result, organs are frequently repossessed by Remy and Jake for a hefty commission, catching the customers off guard when the Repo Men come to collect.
Remy is stuck in a tough situation because his wife wants him to switch to selling organs for The Union, which would provide him with less gruesome work and more predictable hours so he can spend more time with his son and the rest of his family.
After Jake decides to repo an organ at Remy’s family barbecue, Jake’s wife leaves with their son, upset that Jake and Remy would continue to do their work at a family barbecue.
Eventually, while Remy is out on a job to repossess the organs of a famous DJ, he becomes electrocuted and knocked unconscious only to awake in a hospital with a new artiforg heart implanted in his chest. After his artiforg is implanted, Remy has a difficult time getting back to work repossessing organs, and can’t pay for his implanted heart.
The Union then sends a repo man after one of their own, while Remy runs away with a nightclub singer named Beth as they both try to avoid being repoed.
Repo Men had the potential to be a great movie with a half-decent plot, but instead it suffered from being overly cliché, not working hard enough to create a realistic setting for the movie – it seems to be set in a city similar to Gotham City, but with signs written in both English and Chinese.
The main issue with the movie is that the production team designed a futuristic, computer-generated scene to show the whole city in the movie, but then didn’t spend any money on set design to create a world in which the detail shots would reinforce the computer-generated city.
For example, the house that Remy lives in and the grill that he barbecues on are both straight out of present day. Even the cars in the movie are a Toyota Prius and a Volkswagen Touareg, but for some reason neither of those cars reinforce the “futuristic” nature of the movie.
The other issue with this movie is that although it was a sci-fi thriller, there were many aspects of the movie which were so overly cliché and predictable that there was little else to do but laugh. One of the main fight scenes towards the end of the movie seems straight out of a dream as Remy fights to take out dozens of people in a major fight scene, plowing through person after person with two blades.
While the ending has one of the strangest and most frustrating last scenes of any movie I have ever seen, it was unable to redeem the movie as a whole for its long list of shortcomings. However, I have to say that the strangest part of the movie for me certainly had to be a segment where there was a surgery involving Remy and Beth which was filmed and edited similarly to softcore pornography and was extremely disturbing to the audience.
Overall, the movie is one which can be easily missed, especially for the $10 ticket price you’re likely to pay if you see it in theatres. If you’re dying to see the movie, you’re better off waiting for it to come out on DVD and then renting it from a Redbox kiosk in Shaw’s.
Rating: 1/5 Falcons
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