Friday, July 1, 2011

Repo Men (2010)

Starring: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga
Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik 

Repo Men is a sci-fi film that has a lot of good ideas. It starts out with a very interesting "what if" question, as many good sci-fi films do. The unfortunate thing is, thats the only thing it does well. Almost everything else about Repo Men is mediocre at best. 

Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) work as repossession officials for a large corporation called The Union in the not too distant future. The only thing is, this company sells insanely expensive artificial organs to the sick and wounded. When people get behind on their payments, the repo men are sent out to recover the organs... In some of the most disturbing ways possible. From here, the story takes some very predictable turns. It manages to pull off one surprising twist, but everything else is cliché. It ends up being very disappointing because there is so many directions they could have gone with this- Instead of going for pure shock when organs are harvested in disgusting ways from innocent people. 

Should have gone with the PPO.....

The acting is another problem here. Its incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes Jude Law does a fair job, other times his lines come of as stilted and hollow. Whitaker just seems out of place in this whole film. Some of the secondary actors are much better than the lead cast, however, there are still no outstanding performances in this film. Some scenes are just pure awkward. One in particular involves lots of semi-nude making out, while the two characters slice each other open to scan their artificial organs. It just reeks of some really odd sexual fantasy.

Tarantino's foot fetish suddenly seems a lot less weird. 

Bottom Line: 4/10: It starts off with a good idea that is marred by bad everything else. The story can hold your attention if you're not too grossed out by the gore. There is a plot twist, which I'm not sure was intelligent or cheap...I'll just say it was interesting. Lots of questions are left unanswered, like why it seems that 80% of the population has needed an organ transplant. Don't go for this one unless you really want to... Unless you're a die hard sci-fi buff, chances are you won't enjoy Repo Men a single bit. 






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