Thursday, March 25th, 2010
GRADE: B-
By Michael Knox
Mknox@modernfilmzine.com
One of the best parts of “Repo Men” is how director Miguel Sapochnik uses upbeat, happy music to set a jovial tone during a rather gruesome sequence.
Now, this isn’t exactly original, especially if you watch the television show, “Dexter,” but it did surprise me and instantly made me realize that the movie I was walking into might be a lot funnier than I expected.
The story takes place in the near future when people have their damaged organs replaced by mechanical parts. It’s like the car industry, but for mechanical body organs, from a heart to new pair of eyes. But the cost of these replacements run hundreds of thousands of dollars, requiring financing. This is a nice jab at the housing market crash and satirizing our economy, talking about how we fall behind on payments and have items repossessed.
But in this world, when you fall behind on your payments, it could kill you, with Repo Men sent to take back whatever mechanical organ you have that’s keeping you going.
Jude Law and Forest Whitaker each play Repo Men and to these two it’s just a job, even though they have each killed so many people they’ve lost track. Law plays a family man, trying to balance his Repo work with his life as a husband and father. Whitaker plays his old childhood buddy, who believes that a man is his job.
That’s all well and good until Law goes on a mission to Repo a man’s heart and ultimately gets injured himself. He wakes up to find that he needs a new heart and is going to have to finance his payments, or die himself.
Liev Schreiber (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” and “Taking Woodstock”)
plays an excellently sleazy salesmen, who convinces people to go ahead and finance payments on the new organs. And he always uses the pitch, “Do it for your family. Do it for yourself.” The sleazy bastard even uses this tired old speech on Law’s character, not thinking about the fact that the man has heard it hundreds of times back at the office.
All of this sets up the action when Law is shaken by what has happened to him and now sees his potential Repo “clients” as people with families.
He loses his nerve and that causes him to stop making money and fall behind on his payments. Admittedly it does take a bit longer than I would have liked to set all of this up, but once the action gets going it really kicks in. It’s Whitaker who is forced to go hunting is old childhood friend as the two play cat and mouse, with Law trying to stay ahead of Whitaker and other Repo Men.
And at the heart of this action romp is a black heart of comedy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s more action than comedy, but there are some bitter moments that had me cackling. One such sequence you have probably already seen in the trailer, involving Jude Law’s character scanning a fat man who is late on payments. The man shouts, “I just sent the check in today!” before running off. Law breaks out laughing, saying, “Jesus, he might need another heart.”
There’s another great sequence involving a “discussion” between Law, his wife and their son on a train. I don’t want to ruin it, but lets just say the son’s gift for silencing the argument is beautiful and had me burst out laughing.
Again, this is a dark comedy. I was laughing at parts that I think some people in the audience felt were inappropriate moments of laughter. But I really enjoyed myself and was actually caught off guard a couple of times.
By no means is this a brilliant script. It’s simply good at delivering the right pacing, once it settles in, and having some nice dark comedy moments to throw you off a bit. And again, the use of music in this movie was one thing I really enjoyed.
What’s funny is that even though I liked the use of the music in the movie, the film never reminded me of the rock opera, “Repo.”
Fans of “Repo: The Genetic Opera” may be thinking this is a rip off of that movie, but the two stories couldn’t be more different. This movie is another entry in that particular “organ repossession” subgenre that seems to be developing.
It’s like trying to compare “The Road” to “The Book of Eli.” Both movies are apocalypse films, but extremely different in tone, attitude and energy. The same thing can be said of the differences between “Repo: The Genetic Opera” and “Repo Men.”
And though I ultimately like “Repo: The Genetic Opera” better, just because it’s an over the top rock opera, I can say that “Repo Men” is worth sitting through again. It may not be a brilliant movie, but it can definitely be a fun two hours to escape into. Just as long as you can handle a little gore and some dark humor.
