Repo Men (2010)

Repo Men could have been a really cool cyberpunk type movie, but it wasn't. Think Bladerunner but not as gritty, intelligent, or good. Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker play a pair of repo men that work for an evil corporation that manufactures and distributes artificial human organs. When people fall behind on their payments the repo men come to take the organs back. I don't really understand the business model being used in this movie. The organs cost in the neighborhood of $600,000 and the interest rate on the loan of the organ is 19.95%. The salesman have a variety of payment plans available for a variety of lifestyles should you not be able to afford to buy the organ up front. Throughout the movie organs are repossessed from alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, the homeless, and just about everyone else you wouldn't give a loan or an organ to. Sure the corporation just hunts them down and takes back their organs, but why did they give them out in the first place? It turns out that they do that because if they didn't Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker wouldn't have anything to do and the movie would resemble the Maytag repairman commercials. Anyway, things are going poorly for Jude Law because his wife has problems with her husband going out an effectively murdering people. Law decides to give up the repo business after one last job. Unfortunately for Law he suffers an accident that damages his heart and he has to get an artificial one. After recovering he no longer looks at things the same and can no longer carve people up for a living. As a result Law falls behind on his payments and his heart is ordered to be reclaimed.

The movie doesn't do a very good job establishing why the company can just go out and hack people up, or why nobody seems interested in stopping them when they are. I guess the audience is just supposed to assume the corporation controls everything. With the high body count that Law and Whittaker rack up, just in the first half hour, it's a wonder that anyone is left alive at all, nobody seems to be paying for their organs. The public at large seems to be oblivious to this fact because all it takes is a few soothing words from the sales rep and they all sign on the dotted line. The big problem with Repo Men is that it simply isn't very believable and the movie makes very little effort to make it so.

Fmovies: OK, being a fan of action and mediocre movies in general, i was pumped when i saw the previews for this movie. The film was not quite what i was expecting but was pretty much all i could have hoped for. I knew nothing of the book it was based on going in so i really cant comment on how it compares to the movie. the story was good with great action scenes and at times just plain brutal. this is much more a guy movie than anything else. Go see it, it was really good. The star rating does this film a terrible injustice, this is one of the few times i completely disagree with IMDb. This movie is action packed and extremely entertaining, take it as nothing more than that....

Movies like Repo Men are those that take interesting, even fascinating, premises and butcher them to the point of disfigurement; a bland cookie- cutter version of how the plot could have unravelled. In addition to the obvious plot arc that can easily be surmised from the trailers, any good will built up over the running time is similarly bastardized by a horrendous final twist that is not only nonsensical but cheap. This reveal is not only blatantly alluded to early on but even for those who did not pick up on it will not be surprised by the finale. In yet another paint-by-numbers dystopian future where highly advanced artificial organs are now a reality, we follow two repo men by the names of Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) whose task it is to reclaim said organs from customers who have fallen behind on payments. They gleefully extract hearts, livers, kidneys, etc leaving their former customers on the wrong side of alive. Yet, after an on the job accident leaves Remy himself with an 'artiforg', as they are called, and subsequently is unable to make payments he goes on the run. With the help of a woman who is nearly all 'fake' so to speak (it is eye-rolling developments like this that make up Repo Men) he tries to bring down his former employer with Jake hot on his trail. Thank goodness at the center of it all we get three solid performances from Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as the titular repo men, and Liev Schreiber as their morally defunct boss. Without this trio to ground the movie in some realm of watchability this could have been an unmitigated disaster instead of just a near-disaster. The gore is ample in Repo Men but it appears in all the wrong places. Instead of using the violent repossessions as tentpole instances of shock, they pepper the story with such frequency, everything becomes white-washed (or should I say red- washed) and muted in effectiveness. I will admit, there are some well choreographed, badass action sequences but they can do little to lift the remaining material. Even with these kinetic bursts, the characters at the center are all so unlikable, whether they live or die becomes moot. Are we truly supposed to root for a murderer just because he had a moral epiphany and who in addition cheats on his wife after she condemns his job and then proceeds to abandon her and his son? All this is loosely strung together by a bland and sporadic voice-over which serves no discernible purpose. There are so many unanswered questions floating around Repo Men. What has happened to lead up to this future? What is government like to give this company absolute power to slaughter countless people? And where is the money in selling organs to those who cannot pay anyways? It is questions like these and more that leave Repo Men a vapid and unmemorable vision of the future with little to say about much of anything.

Repo Men fmovies. All in all, I found this movie quite a disappointment. I have a soft spot for sci-fi, and as several others have commented, Jude Law is a good reliable actor in sci-fi roles. But this movie seems awkwardly assembled, not quite thought-out, and a bit too proud of itself to be taken seriously. Throughout the film, at what seem to be important developmental points or even plot twists, there are one-liners tossed out with great sincerity, which in most cases either sound silly, pretentious, intellectually impoverished, or simply misplaced in this film. The first scene of the film, for instance, we are given a summarization of the 'Schroedinger's Cat' experiment, complete with some of the horrible logic underlying the film--- 'if something isn't definably dead or alive, then it must be both'. The fact that this statement shows a misunderstanding of both the scientific and philosophic merit of the experiment isn't the problem, because even incorrect junk science can be a good vehicle in a movie. The problem is that there's no reason to bring this up in the first place. the movie doesn't tackle whether things are dead or alive, whether being comprised of 'rented organs' is an crisis of existential definitions or what have you. The reference is just thrown in there to sound smart, to seem thoughtful, when the film is anything but. And this sort of pseudo intellectual posturing contaminates the movie.

The whole film's pace feels quite forced, as well. Jude Law seems underutilized. One can't help but wonder if he got drunk for the majority of the shooting for this film. When his wife leaves him, there's almost no emotion in the scene. When twenty minutes later our hero has decided to dedicate his eternal love to a street girl he finds attractive, there's really no chemistry whatsoever--- but apparently the movie insists that there be a love interest, and so it's just thrown in there, pointlessly. Because even in this day and age, it's apparently impossible to propose a hero character without a token damsel in distress.

Then there's the kind of gratuitous and uncomfortable 'surgical sex' scene. It's apparent that whoever choreographed it thought they were being clever, but the whole thing just seems like an attempt to force some sort of correlation between sex and surgical procedures that really just felt misplaced, and kind of heavy-handed. Granted, it has a purpose within the plot, but it's basically a slice of experimental film amid a sci-fi action flick, and like a lot of experiments, it fails.

There are some positive points to the film. While Jude Law's acting is a disappointment, Forrest Whittaker delivers a solid role. The action scenes are quite good, and while the overbearing presence of music makes some of it feel like a weird music video, it's nonetheless well-choreographed fighting and slashing. Some of the sets are good, although a fair number of sets and sequences seem blatant rip-offs of 'Brazil' (to say nothing of the ending)...

A pretty mindless flick. It's better than watching dust settle on your screen. A prettily-packaged emptiness.

When the economic crisis first hit, Clive Owen came out with The International, a film about an evil bank. With the health care crisis now in full swing, Jude Law has come out with Repo Men, a film about evil health care people. Repo Men is good, but seems to have come out a bit early because this seems like a perfect summer film.

I cannot remember a time when Jude Law was this much fun. Fresh off a turn as Watson in Guy Ritchie's superb Sherlock Holmes, Law plays Remy, who work for the The Union, a company that supplies artificial body parts. If you can't pay for them, The Union sends Remy and his best mate Jake (Forrest Whitaker) after you. They cut you open and take the parts back. Its a bloody good time for all.

Law is such a badass in this film. You would think a role like this would go to Jason Statham, but a renowned actor like Law, who really isn't used to being the badass, plays the part very well. With the amount of blood and violence and quick takes, you would think this flick was made by the Neveldine/Taylor duo. First time director Miguel Sapochnik does the film well, but you'd like to see what an experienced director could do with it.

While Repo Men falls short with some of its blood for the sake of blood scenes and some acting shortcomings (Forrest is good but has too little to do), it makes up for it with Law and its twist ending. Go catch Repo Men. You'll rip your heart out if you don't.

This movie is a great analogy between what happened due to "the innovations" in the financial world. Example: "Sure you need to buy this house and sign for the mortgage ... you owe it to yourself ... you owe it to your family" ... And a couple of years later they take away your house and leave you with a great debt that also ruins your life and may even cost your life. More and more people are not able to cope anymore and commit suicide and sometimes even kill their own young children to "spare them". The people that come to collect or sell your stuff can be compared with the repo man. They can do it, until they're a victim themselves ... What I didn't like about this representation of how the system has become way more important than what is was for ... is the amount of blood. Still, it makes it all the more horribly and painfully clear what we're dealing with here ... What I liked about the story, is how it's presented that the bond between two people ain't all that clear. It was astounding to find out how it finally turns out what Jake has arranged for Remy.