The Bounty Hunter: Double take

The costumes in “The Bounty Hunter” are horrible. Gerard Butler is dressed in a $20 plaid gap shirt, ill-fitting khakis, and chunky sneakers. Jennifer Aniston spends the movie in a skirt so tight that it gives her a pooch the entire time. That’s right. Jennifer “90 pound” Aniston appears to have a belly because the costume designer was too concentrated on making her boobs look good.

My passion about the costuming is about as much emotion I can scrounge up about this romantic? Comedy? I admit I was expecting it to be bad, really bad, Godzilla (1998) bad. I now see that this was actually wishful thinking because at least bad is something. The Bounty Hunter is nothing.

Gerard Butler is an ex-cop turned bounty hunter. Jennifer Aniston is a hard-hitting reporter who skips bail for a minor crime to pursue a story involving a suicide/murder/police cover up. Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston wrestle and get back together and break up. And there is also a bookie looking for Butler to collect $11,000 in kneecaps. Yar di yar yar.

It reminded me, in some ways, of a screenplay I wrote when I was 18 about rival gangsters crews in Boston. It was a terrible screenplay because I didn’t know anything about gangsters, but I did know a lot of clichés. This holds true for screenwriter Sarah Thorp as well.

Cheap is the best way to explain this movie. Cheap clothes. Cheap lines. Cheap plot. Cheap acting. Gerard Butler appeared to be in a drunken black out for much of the movie. And for his sake I hope it’s true.

Christine Baranski was really great though. She mostly talking on the phone to Jennifer Aniston (her daughter) and made jokes about drag queens. Her name was Kitty Hurley.

Can we please have a movie about her?


I give this movie 1 Michael Douglas’s out of 5.

Repo Men - Doubletake: Actually, I don't feel so good after all...

Until I saw “Repo Men,” I had completely forgotten Forest Whitaker was in “Battlefield Earth.”

Not that he’s the worst thing about either movie. No, that blame in both cases has to lie with the script. But he signed on to those scripts, and frankly, he knows better. Forest Whitaker, you are actor-grounded until after actor-prom. Which I guess is the Oscars. And since they just happened, you’ve got about eleven months to think about what you’ve done.

Jude Law, I’m disappointed in you, but I’m sorry to say I’m not surprised. This is about what I’ve come to expect from you.

Liev Schrieber, you were a beacon of light in the midst of this mess, making a meal out of a morsel. Thank you for being so deliciously despicable.

The truth is that “Repo Men” is an enormously frustrating movie, amounting to a massive mismanagement of an intellectual property. I can’t write it off as just bad, because it is such a great concept. Oh, wait. Yes I can. In ridiculously appropriate fashion, I would very much like to surgically open up the movie, remove its vital organs, and transplant them into a body that makes sense, isn’t riddled with plotholes, and isn’t getting into absurd and unnecessary fist, gun, and knife fights every ten minutes because it’s so afraid its audience will get bored with it and go wander into “The Crazies.” “Repo Men,” you don’t need the popcorn theatrics; just be yourself. You are the codependent girlfriend of movies: the more desperate you are to keep us with you, the more you scare us away.

The themes and premise of this flick are intriguing and timely. There are flashes of absolute brilliance. The first five minutes set up a gritty film noir future, and the last ten showcase the most unique sex scene I’ve ever seen. Everything in between, however, made my brain roll its eyes.

The morality of the universe never makes sense for an instant. It’s very hard to swallow that even if the business of forcibly repossessing delinquent artificial organs existed, that the “repo men” entrusted with the job would do it out in the open. Or if they did, that anyone would use their product. The movie tries to wipe this inconsistency away with Frank Mercer’s (Schrieber) pitch to a potential client that “What you’ve heard about us on the news almost never happens.” But with as indiscrete as Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) are, it seems likely that not only has this client heard about this on the news, but he probably witnessed one the murderous reclamations for himself on his way up the escalator (In a clever move, the offices of The Union - the sinister corporation behind all these shenanigans – are located in a suburban mall, presumably between a Hot Topic and an Orange Julius).

It’s not that I don’t think a corporation wouldn’t stoop to murder to make a buck, particularly in Movieland, I just think they would have to cover it up a bit better. As we learn from a scanner scene in an airport (remember how I said there was a ton of timely thematic material?), not only is it not covered up, but the FAA must be in on it too. The scanner is geared specifically to pick up these delinquent artificial organs. Since the FAA is a federal organization, that must mean that the government knows about all this casual civilian murder as well. I know this is the future, but I don’t think society is going to change so much that folks stop giving a crap about murder. 

I’m a real “glass half-full” kind of guy.

So I didn’t buy that part of the premise. But the underlying bits, that in the world the filmmakers set up, people enter into unsustainable financial contracts in the name of obtaining the health care they need, that human beings are becoming overly reliant on technology and get suckered in to buying things they don’t need. and that corporations are after profit at the expense of everything else…that stuff I buy. The bones. The blood, the muscle, the tissues, the organs. What’s wrong with “Repo Men,” is the treatment of the potent thematic elements it’s got floating around inside. Ironically, for a movie about people replacing their failing insides, the surgery the film itself needs most is a facelift.

Repo Men: The Feel-Good Family Film of the Spring! - Take

Buried deep in the recesses of “Repo Men,” somewhere beneath the action film with pretensions of social commentary, beats the dark, ugly heart of a poetic and intriguing film noir. Unfortunately, the quartet of strong performances from the likes of Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber and Alice Braga never quite manage to drag the movie up from the B gutter into the light of an A picture.

“Repo Men” grows from a fertile premise. In the future, every type of artificial organ has been perfected. Their distribution, however, has been completely privatized under the auspices of a company known as The Union. Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) are two of The Union’s “Repo Men,” assigned to repossess organs whose owners have fallen behind in their payments. As all good sci-fi does, “Repo Men” meditates on and extrapolates from concerns that are thoroughly grounded in modern-day reality. The universe crafted by screenwriters Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner (Garcia wrote the novel the film is based on) provides a thematic sandbox filled with issues like health care, unchecked capitalism, and privacy rights. The movie does indeed touch on all these, but too often devolves quickly into knifefights. Because you know what’s great to do with a phenomenal actor like Forrest Whitaker? Give him lines like, “I had him. Didn’t you see I had a knife in his side?”

Liev Schrieber, however, can use his nasal Bronx drawl on the line “Gimme yer feckin’ hyeart,” all he wants.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a good, enjoyable action thriller. But it had the potential to be something truly great and original, a mix of “Gattaca” and “Dirty Pretty Things.” For all the gleaming, futuristic production design, the actual production values rarely rise above a cable TV drama. The spine of this thing cries out for bold, uncompromising direction. The casual violence done to human bodies calls to mind Cronenberg. Unfortunately, in the hands of relative newcomer Miguel Sapochnik, it all ends up feeling rather pedestrian. One can almost hear the executive producer saying “No one gives a crap about existential moral fables. Can he taser two more guys in this scene?”

After the basic set-up, the story kicks into classic chase mode when one of Remy’s repo jobs goes awry and ends up costing him his own natural heart. The Union generously implants one of their own “artiforgs” (the clunkiest, fakest possible colloquialism for artificial organs) for which Remy can’t come close to paying. So he goes on the run, meeting up with Beth (Braga) a multiple implantee in similarly dire straits. Predictably, they fall in tragic love and set out to bring down the corrupt and evil corporation that Remy had no problem with until it decided it wanted to carve him up into flank steak and serve him with a side of country fried potatoes.

“Repo Men” is a fun, testosterone-charged night out at the movies, with enough of an intellectual bent to keep you from putting a fork through your own eye for shelling out nine to twelve bucks to see it. But it really is a shame that in the end it doesn’t amount to more than that.

The Bounty Hunter: Take

A lot of people are probably guessing that Jennifer Aniston’s upcoming Rom Com “the Bounty Hunter” is terrible title, terrible premise, and a terrible movie. What those people don’t know is everything.

“The Bounty Hunter” starring Aniston and hunk of the moment Gerard Butler starts out as a cookie cutter story. Butler is a down on his luck hunter of bounties and is surprised to learn that feisty ex-wife Aniston is his latest target. Blah blah blah Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But just as we are gently lulled into a feeling of security screenwriter Sarah Throp (formerly of TV- good for her) puts our head in a trash can and bangs the outside with a fucking pipe wrench in the form of SPACE WARS!!

That’s right. 17 minutes into the movie the whole tepid “bounty hunter” bullshit is thrown out the window as Jupiterians (of Jupiter) invade the lower 48 states and and start killing everyone with marrow in their bones. It’s up to Butler and Aniston to come together and fight these evil monsters for the sake of the human race!

The last third of the movie takes place entirely in the silence of space, a bold move for Sweet Home Alabama director Andy Tennant, forcing his two leads to communicate non-verbally and for the audience to truly learn what those secret looks between lovers are really about.

Sadly, they both die trying to save the lower 48 states. And sadder still, the lower 48 states are also lost to the Jupiterians. Is this a metaphor for the futility of love? Or the devastation that space exploration has wreaked on our economy? Only Frosty Lawson (Racetrack Attendant) knows, and he ain’t telling.


Frosty Lawson.