Before I begin, a short open letter to Darren Bousman, who by now is probably about to have an embolism because Repo Men is going to literally DESTROY Repo: The Genetic Opera’s opening by any standard measure.
Darren, buddy, concept films are awesome, but if the story’s weak and the ending’s a half-assed attempt at going for a sequel and you spend more time singing than you do on character development, your movie’s going to SUCK. Yes, yes, you’re going for cult. But Repo will probably make its budget back in the first weekend. How long did it take you?
And Repo Men will take the concept of the Repossession Mambo and run with it in a way Bousman’s soggy musical never could. Read on.
Repo Men posits a future in which artificial organs are widely available, but are clearly managed by the profit motive. Thus, an artificial liver might sell for half a million dollars. For most people, of course, this is wildly out of reach, so The Union, the company behind the artificial organs, offers easy credit terms that stop just short of usury (I seem to remember 19.66 percent APY involved in one discussion). The caveat here, of course, is that if you can’t meet your payments, your organs are repossessed by the Repo Men, a skilled, paramilitary organization that operates as little more than sanctioned murderers. Following an accident on the job, one Repo Man receives a new heart–but finds that he can’t continue repossessing organs, knowing full well that anyone he repossesses on might well have been like him–a person with a family who loved them. Thus, he finds himself on the run from The Union, and out to put an end to their usurious practices once and for all.
Of course, one wonders several things in this movie–our Repo Man is clearly injured on the job but somehow neither got workman’s comp nor sued? He didn’t even get a free heart as a fringe benefit? And where are the health insurance companies in all this? Did they just fold up their tents when they saw the prices and realized after a couple hundred heart transplants they’d go bankrupt?
But these are the standard sort of plot holes you get in a movie like this–wider implications are seldom considered. Meanwhile, the rest of the movie is, as I said, a straightforward run-and-gun romp that really doesn’t take any chances (we must take down the evil corporation that’s extending people’s lives if for no other reason than to trap them in profit slavery forever!) and can’t quite seem to pin down whether it’s supposed to be tragic or comic.
The ending is frankly a cheat, there are plenty of missed opportunities here, but at least it vaguely resembles a story, which is more than could be said for its Bousman predecessor. See, these two are working both sides of the fence. While Bousman’s version failed utterly for being so ludicrously daring that it didn’t even resemble a movie any more, Repo Men sticks to convention so hard that the best–and worst–thing you can say about it is that it’s purely mediocre.
Repo Men looks like any of a hundred other movies you’ve already seen–not that it’s done poorly, mind you, it’s just so textbook, so cookie-cutter, that you’ll be convinced you’ve had this dish before. Although I should spare a moment to mention one of the greatest fight sequences I’ve seen since The Matrix Revolutions’ “Super Burly Brawl” featuring what can only be called “Hacksaw cam”. It’s really something in its combination of elegance and brutality.
The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this passing fancy a nod of respect and hands it its deserved score, a slightly better than mediocre six out of ten.
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