I will admit that I am harder on scifi movies than any other genre. Being a huge fan, having read it since I was a kid (starting with Tom Swift Jr.,) I know the scope of incredible themes, characters and concepts available and possible. Scifi can be anything any other story can be - romance, actioneer, comedy - and still deal with dystopian and utopian futures, post-apocalyptic scenarios, aliens, microscopic worlds, uni-sex planets...the range is breathless.
"Repo Men" is a clever scifi concept looking for a decent story. It tries and fails to visit a possible future where artificial organs are de rigueur and financing for those organs has become a business run by "The Union." (Begin psuedo-future-societal scifi bullshit with that vaguely threatening and totally implausible corporate name.) If you can't pay you're visited by the Repo Men section of The Union and they cut their pastdue merchandise out of your body on the floor of your living room, public bathroom, or wherever else you're unlucky enough to be if you're 96 days past due. No extensions possible.
And yes, most likely you will die after they complete their gruesome task because they don't use anesthetic, care about hygiene or really anything but getting said organ back to the shop.
Repo men (Jude Law and Forest Whitaker) are not sentimental or squeamish about cutting people open and removing things. Eyes, ears, limbs, hearts, livers - just about anything that can be replaced with a mechanical one can also be repossessed by slicing it out of you.
In a not-unexpected twist, Jude Law becomes a recipient of an artificial heart, gets behind on his payments (does no one have health insurance in this fakakta world? ) and is hunted by the Repo Men. Note to President Obama: Please, do not show this movie to the Senate to shock them into passing health care legislation - they'll turn on you.
He tries after surgery to go back to being the cold-blooded S.O.B. he was before he had his heart replaced but he can't. Oh, the irony abounds! With a real heart, he's
a prick without a conscience; with an artificial heart, he's a marshmellow with feelings. He just cannot bring himself anymore to cut an organ out of anyone. He says, "I kept thinking that every one of those people had a wife and kids" - or words to that effect. Wha-huh? This is now just occurring to him? Wouldn't you assume that he would have had this thought or conversation just once or twice before? Especially since his wife leaves him specifically because he does this for a living?
Therein lies the problem in a nutshell to this mess of a movie. Characters have revelations that have no solid basis and plot elements are casually tossed in without regard to setup or payoff. Along with a loooong time to get to the meat of the story, and some horribly bad extrapolation, it all makes for a tedious and not-entertaining sit.
In perhaps the most egregious example of plot elements tossed in willy-nilly, a major player, Beth, (Alice Braga) becomes Jude's love interest midway through the film and he suddenly becomes willing to sacrifice everything to save her simply on the basis of a song she sang in a bar one time.
Miss Braga is an attractive woman but she isn't classically beautiful, and we see no scenes with her up to this point - none - during which she speaks so we can't get to know her and understand why she's so special to anyone, let alone a man she meets while sitting in some garbage in the requisite burned out urban area where all the people running away from repossession seem to gather. Attention all scifi bad guys: just find the urban-decayed area in your city and you'll find whoever you're chasing plus a bunch of hapless victims to kill.
Why in the world the Jude Law character falls in love with Braga is just never explained. His entire life is going to shit around him (new heart, can't work, wife leaving, etc.) and this guy suddenly gets the hots for a woman who has more artificial parts than The Terminator (ears, voice box, knees, hips...oh, who cares.)
Liev Schreiber who plays Jude Law's boss has scenes that make absolutely no sense. What upper-managment wonk do you know who dons an apron and checks in reclaimed artificial parts like some grocery clerk? (Trust me it makes no sense if you see it either.) The scene exists solely so they have to go to The Union HQ and find "the pink door" and *sigh*, never mind.
And what exactly was the point of the book the Jude Law character "writes" (on a typewriter, no less - give me a f*ing break) called "Repossession Mambo." Oh, I know that's the title of the actual book the film was based on (by Eric Garcia who also contributed to the screenplay) but the title is dumb times two and is never really explained. Oh, wait - was it a joke? Yeah, well, I didn't get it. Like most of this film.
The movie borrows from "RoboCop," "Blade Runner," "Logan's Run," and "Fahrenheit 451" to no good effect. Where those films were cautionary tales, and this one tries to be, it's not finely-tuned enough to be effective, settling instead for ultra-bloody moments and lame jokes instead of decent explorations. You can see the backdrop of health care gone rampant in this - it's obvious - but it never achieves the moments where you really get scared that someday you're going to need a part and won't be able to afford it.
The other major problem with this film is it can't decide what it wants to be tonally: slasher flick, comedy, tragedy, horror...the story and characters just are simply not strong enough to sustain this salad of themes and genres. The opening tone is smart, jokey, bizarre - almost "Brazil-like." Then it gets dumb and serious.
It's just very hard to cozy up to a character who puts on headsets to listen to music (decent soundtrack by the way) as he's slicing open a dude and forcibly removing his heart. But if that's going to be the tone, then make that the tone. Stop dropping in moments of anguish where he begs to see his kid or he falls intensely and Shakespearianly (yeah, I know that's not a word) in love with an enigmatic woman - or when he's discussing his historical manlove for his big, dim-witted compadre who has now become the instrument of his destruction. Stay the hell on tone! Now who thought I'd ever write that phrase?
WARNING: GEEK RANT AHEAD - Social commentary of the kind that "Repo Men" is trying to accomplish has to be fully thought out. Scifi works because scifi writers spend hours thinking and researching the far-reaching effects of their worlds, understanding the impact of the societies they are creating. I know this is a terribly small thing but there's this tattoo that all these guys have on the side of their neck - not some of them, all. It's a fakey kind of bar code thing - pseudo futuristic, doncha know? Like putting 
an apostrophe in a name to make it an alien name. Mark becomes Ma'ark and suddenly I'm alien. Anyway, the tattoo has absolutely no function. It isn't a way to get into anything like a secret room or even the Repo Men bathroom; no one ever recoils in horror from someone who is wearing one; and just a thought but if you're trying to repossess something don't you think you'd be a little less obvious about it and perhaps not have this big-ass ink that screams "I'm here to cut your parts out!" Small maybe but it points to a larger problem. God save me from directors and writers who don't understand scifi and who do that kind of crap thinking that they are creating subtle and clever social commentary. Ugh.
"Repo Men" almost redeems itself with its ending - if it hadn't come out of basically nowhere. Oh sure, the technology is mentioned but it's never given enough emphasis for us to guess it will play a part so it feels like a total cheat.
If you like your films bloody, senseless, and manic "Repo Men" has flashes of entertainment. And I will give it points for trying in all categories. Had they done better work, kept it reasonable, I think I might have liked it more. As is, I wish theaters allowed us to do the Priceline thing and negotiate our price for movies. Well, maybe not - even at half the face value of the ticket, I still would have asked for a further reduction and/or refund.
See it on DVD (if at all) and you'll hate yourself less.
