Repo Men
Image From IMDB
Repo Men (2010)
Another great concept that needed a little more focus to fully flesh it out. Repo Men had some strong performances, some cool world building, and a great central idea, but got lost in a simple ‘someone on the run’ story. Equilibrium without the guns. Sci-fi Fugitive without the personal lost. Looper without the stakes. It just needed something more to hook you into the central story.
Repo Men follows Remy (Jude Law) an organ repossessor who tracks you down and removes your artificial organs if you fall behind on the payments. A bounty hunter of sorts, but he’s not out to kill you, just take back company property if you default. Although, he doesn’t mind killing you as well. Naturally, he ends up with an artificial organ himself, and falls behind on the payments. So, he ends up being chased by his former employer, who tasks the retrieval of Remys organs to his former partner Jake (Forest Whitaker)
The whole futuristic artificial organ thing is fascinating. The enhanced eyes and memory, along with the more needed new liver, kidney, heart etc is just great sci-fi, and reminded me of my Cyberpunk 2077 Upgrades for V. And the idea of having them removed if you fall behind on your payments is equally as great. There’s a lot to love about the idea (in a film manner of course, in reality it sounds terrifying)
Jude Law is always good, as is Forest Whitaker, and I really enjoy their friendship, and love of the cruel job (before things go wrong) Liev Schreiber also tries to steal every scene he’s in as their smug boss. The action is fun and the blood plentiful as they remove the various body parts to log them back at HQ.
Where this movie falls down for me is the lack of focus. It needed something stronger to hold it together. More time spent on how the world came to be how it is. When Remy goes to the airport they’re checking for unregistered or out of date organs… and I want to know why? I get that it’s important to the company loaning them, but why does it matter to the rest of the world. To the airport or national security. And outside of the organs. why has little else changed? I guess I just wanted the idea explored more.
Outside of the lack of world building, I also didn’t care for Remy’s marriage. It was time wasted that could have gone to building Alice Braga’s character Beth more. The film had different ideas for the different relationships, but tried to work all of them into the plot, where it needed to be a little more streamlined.
But, as mentioned, the central concept really is good, and the film moves along at a decent pace. I was never bored and was into the story, I just needed more direction from it. I feel like maybe parts of this review are more negative than I want them to be, but I’ve watched several of these types of movies of late and they all seem a little undercooked despite having sufficient run time… or maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. A good film that’s well worth a watch, but could have been better.
