REPO MEN

“REPO MEN” (Jude Law & Forest Whitaker)

When I saw the preview to this it looked like an interesting concept – one that I knew my wife wouldn’t be interested in, so I waited until it came to East Valley for $3. Glad I waited. Though it isn’t bad, it IS at the very least interesting, but I was hoping it would be campier. I was also reluctant to see it when I found out it was a remake of a recent Paris Hilton ‘musical’ – one that was placed on several ‘worst of the year’ lists.
Jude Law plays Remy & Forest Whitaker, Jake. They’ve been friends since grade school & now they’re ‘Repo Men’ for a company called The Union. As Remy explains in the opening voiceover, “If you don’t make your car payments, they take your car back; if you don’t make your house payments, the bank takes your house; so it makes sense that if you miss payments on your replacement organs, they should be repossessed as well.”
It was made a little more plausible in that The Union manufactures mechanical organs, so anyone with a scalpel can cut into a ‘deadbeat’ & remove the property so it may be returned to the company & re-used. Liev Schrieber plays Remy & Jake’s boss who berates Remy for bringing in his repo containers in front of prospective customers; “When they realize what’s at stake they make damn sure they keep up with their payments; if they pay, we don’t make money.”
Remy’s grumpy wife Carol (Carice van Houten) wants him to quit his job & go into sales. After Jake performs a ‘repo’ on a guest at their house, Carol kicks Remy out.
When a faulty defibrillator stops Remy’s heart, he takes a desk job, but his inability to be dishonest prevents him from making a career as a salesman.
This is where the plot goes awry – Remy was injured ‘on the job’ by a mechanical failure, yet we’re expected to believe that Remy has to pay for the new heart The Union places inside him to save his life... I’m sure even in the future this kind of injustice wouldn’t be allowed.
Remy is forced to go on the run, meeting up with Beth (Alice Braga) a multiple mechanical organ recipient. As the couple try to dodge the repo men sent after them, Remy devices an escape plan that almost works, but like every other scene in this film it ends with gory violence where gallons of blood are spurted & spilled.
I wanted to like ‘Repo Men’ for it’s originality (Despite being a re-make) but it reached a new level of stupidity when Remy & Beth are searching for the mysterious ‘Pink Door’ inside The Union’s headquarters & they discover it when they see a sign that says ‘Pink Door >’
It saves itself a little with a clever ending, but overall, I have to give Repo Men just an average grade simply because it took itself way too seriously.