Repo Men (2010) Miguel Sapochnik

Production Budget: $32 million

Worldwide Gross: $17 million

Repo Men is set in the ‘not too distant future’ where organs can be mass produced and sold to people on installment plans. When people default on their payments, repo men come and take back those organs. And if it just so happens people die as a matter of not having those organs than that’s the cost of doing business. Remy (Jude Law) and Jake are friends and some of the best repo men available. Remy has an accident and needs a new heart. Soon after getting it he realizes the immorality of his job.

My big problem (to just dive right in) is this movie can’t just pick a style and stay with it. In the first third, this movie is a dark comedy. They know this is a ridiculous premise and it is best when you can take it with a grain of salt and laugh with it. After all, Repo! The Genetic Opera is the closest thing to this movie and it is a rock opera. But then in the second act it does a 180 turn and becomes this dead serious drama. One minute we are chuckling at the stupidity and then next it is like the movie says “Oh no, we are serious. Isn’t this horrible?” We then sit for the second act while we get a morality lecture. Then in the third act we swap again into big dumb action movie. This movie is schizophrenic and it sucked being jerked around by the writing.

When we get around to the meat of this movie, it is mediocre at best and derivative as all hell at worst. There is a fine line between homage and ripping off. Now I won’t go as far as say this movie steals, but some scenes struck a little too close to home like a hallway scene reminiscent of Oldboy and the ending which smacked of Brazil. Everything else is fine and I suppose people who are inexperienced with these kinds of movies COULD be entertained by some of the stuff they pull. Me? I have seen this kind of stuff a million times before and was completely bored by it. This is a movie that has nothing new to say and no new directions to go.

I furthermore don’t like the main character of Remy. His big moral lesson is that it is wrong to kill people for money. This is something toddlers can figure out and it makes me figure Remy is either an alien who is devoid of empathy/sympathy or is a sociopath. It is only by the second act when he gets a new heart (by the way…SYMBOLISM!!!) he figures that it is kind of wrong to gut people and take their organs for the purposes of some money. Well duuuuuuuuuuuh. Jude Law tries his best in the role, but there simply isn’t anything there to care about. Live Schreiber gets some funny lines in this movie but the best acting goes to Forest Whitaker. In the hands of most actors, I would not buy for a second that Jake and Remy were friends. Whitaker is so good he almost invents the character on his own and makes the audience believe.

I should give special mention to the ending (although without spoiling). It fails on every conceivable level. It fails in the context of the plot, it fails in the context of the tone of the movie, and it fails on a basic storytelling level. I almost feel like writing a paper on how badly this ending misses the mark in an attempt at a cheap GOTCHA.

Like I said before, if you don’t see many movies at all, this may be an alright distraction. But to anyone that is even casually familiar with this genre will be bored by how mediocre it is. The constant shifts in tone and all around imbecilic writing/direction make this movie a very frustrating and shitty movie to me. I hated this movie.