Repo Men – Review
Films reflecting our social/economic climate certainly aren’t hard to come by of late. Whether it be the frustration of the Iraq crisis in Green Zone, or the rise of evil banking corporations in The International, you can pretty much guarantee that there is at least one movie for every one of society’s grumbles. It is fitting, therefore, that just weeks after Barack Obama passed a historic healthcare bill, a sceptical movie focusing on the horrors of widely available organ transplanting is let out into the wild.
This movie is Repo Men, directed by relative newcomer Miguel Sapochnik, and starring Jude Law and Forrest Whitaker as the two protagonists, whose job it is to recollect organs transplanted into patients often without their consent in the first place. The patients are therefore essentially bribed into paying for the organs over several monthly payments, and if they fail to do so, this is where the ‘repo men’ come in, whose typical days tend to consist of hacking and cutting away at people to reclaim the organ they couldn’t pay for.
As a premise, Repo Men is promising, but like so many movies, it slips into mediocrity as the narrative progresses. The not-so-subtle hints of the dangers of taking out loans seems a nice ideology with room for development when placed into a literal context, but Repo Men slips into ‘generic gore fest’ far too often. There is just too much focus on the actual removal of organs, and not enough intelligent plot development, which is a shame because it really is a concept with a lot of room for exploration. Instead, Repo Men too offers attempts to appeal to the gore crowd, losing any sort of individual identity in the process.
Unfortunately, this leads to another shortcoming with Repo Men, in that it just doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Ideological drama? Gorenography? Action sci-fi? Blending genre, when done carefully, can be a huge success. Repo Men, however, metaphorically picks a plethora of genres out of a hat and just hopes for the best. This is again a terrible shame, as it feels as if the film is attempting to adhere to mainstream values far too frequently. The sheer amount of gratuitous gore is completely unnecessary, and tarnishes what would be a decent ideological thriller otherwise.
On the other hand, one area that Repo Men does shine is the performance department, with Jude Law fitting the role of the anti-hero, Remy, perfectly. Supporting performances are solid too, with Liev Schreiber’s sinister Frank proving the standout; a positive sign after the misfire of X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. On a whole though, the cast are forced to make the most of a muddled script, dampening the performances somewhat.
The cinematography is rather standard here too, with breakneck paced editing and classical shots adhered to at all times. This is hardly a complaint; Repo Men never pretends to be a wholly clever film, and the shots actually work to the film’s advantage in places. Establishing shots of a dystopian, Blade Runner-esque near-future set the gritty scene nicely, as does the soundtrack, which is generally solid, particularly scenes where upbeat music runs contrapuntally with images of grotesque nature.
One thing that has to be noted is that despite a promising exposition, Repo Men really does fade into the realms of stupidity in the latter half. The ending twist is cheap and left me wholly unsatisfied with the resolution, but at risk of revealing the ending, I won’t say anything more on the matter other than it is fairly pointless. The protagonist’s relationship with Beth (Alice Braga) is also rather illogical, as Remy effectively ditches his family and falls for a drug addict just because he liked a song she sang. No, really. Its moments of sheer narrative confusion like this that overshadow an interesting expository premise, which again, is a terrible shame. Hopefully a bold lesson will be learned from this, in that a film doesn’t need to be a mish-mash of genres or ideas, when often the most important part of a movie is focus.
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Despite an interesting premise and a solid cast, Repo Men suffers from a confused narrative and bland scripting. Not even Jude Law’s standout performance can save what could have been a successful film from being decidedly mediocre. A shame, seeing as the exposition is so promising.
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