Repo Men

Repo Men (not to be confused with the steam punk oddity Repo Man), at its best moments, is a Pulp Fiction-style adrenaline shot to the chest.  It’s no coincidence that the finale of the film contains a scene that almost exactly copies Tarantino’s famous segment.  Be prepared for what you’re walking into: it’s no messy blood bath, but gore abounds, and the hits come fast and heavy.  Critics so far seem to be disparaging the film (for instance, Rotten Tomatoes currently grades it at 20 percent, a metaphorical death-blow in the eyes the website-savvy cinephile).  The typical comments allege that its plot is fairly weak, its direction lacking in style and substance, and its action sequences ludicrous.  We, on the other hand, will attempt to mount a short defense.  Don’t get us wrong; there are some serious flaws here, but when all is tallied, it still comes in as an above average film.

Repo Men depends upon a rather interesting premise of a world dominated by Wall Street-esque greed and dirty economics.  Mechanical replacement organs have been manufactured at exorbitant cost to consumers, and they are dragged by one company called “The Union” into signing themselves into debt, so that the film’s aforementioned protagonists, played by Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, may later reclaim the property.  As characters go, they aren’t the deepest or most intellectually satisfying, but Whitaker made our skin crawl with his boisterous devil-may-care attitude, at any moment threatening to slide right into the role of the expressionless murderer.  Jude Law’s persona is less well developed, but his character’s slight blurriness is made up for by the script’s insistence on including his ex-wife (played by the gorgeous and underappreciated Carice van Houten) and child to help round things out.  And no matter how they play out individually, as a team Law and Whitaker are quite the magnetic pair (no pun intended, for those who have already seen it).

The plot takes some pretty satisfying twists and turns, and while it may drop the ball a few times, the action sequences more than do their part in picking up the slack and running with it.  “Ludicrous” is not an accurate term for labeling this film’s inspired fight scenes; we’d like to propose the words, “meticulously crafted,” “blood-pumping,” and “original.”  The hallway knife fight near the climax of the film was one of the most adrenaline-charged sequences we have seen in recent memory, although it was eerily reminiscent of the Wachowski brothers’s work, especially V for Vendetta.  So when we say “original,” we mean in its execution, not necessarily in its conception.

Now for the glaring, unavoidable problem that plagues the entire film and keeps it from being great instead of good: the romance angle.  Let’s be honest, we all understand that these days, if you don’t have a dame, you’ve lost half your audience’s interest.  Romance is a necessary part of contemporary popular cinema, a genre into which Repo Men snugly fits.  But this does not allow you to simply throw a woman into your script and assume that the audience will accept her as a de facto romantic lead.  In Repo Men, Alice Braga’s character serves almost no purpose, except as a motivation for the protagonist to lift himself out of his funk midway through.  After this, she might as well be invisible, but for the creepily sexualized evisceration scene between Law and Braga near the end.  It’s not the actress’ fault; her character was simply created to pander to the audience.  The movie would have worked much more smoothly without her, if only the writer had exercised a little more creativity in coming up with character motivations.  But we’ll forgive this flaw, if only because so much of the film is so engagingly entertaining.  In the end, Repo Men doesn’t apologize for its bombastic nature and it doesn’t want to.

-Brian