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.