Repo Men is probably metformin hcl 500 mg dosage the easiest film this year to gauge exactly how good it will be prior to actually watching it. This made it much easier for me to appreciate and enjoy what is for the most part a flawed and decidedly average action movie. The film has plenty of intriguing ideas, but they are mostly bogged down by an uninspired script and underwritten characters. Excellent performances by the actors playing them and a cool premise are the only things saving Repo Men from mediocrity. Most of this can all be discerned from simply watching the trailers and TV spots. You can metformin weight loss tell that it has a good cast anchored by three always solid leads in Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, and Liev Schreiber, but you can also surmise that it will be just like most of the other countless futuristic sci-fi thrillers from the past decade that are built around a unique central premise but fail to deliver the goods elsewhere. The film meets these expectations exactly.
Law and Whitaker are Remy and Jake, repo men for a company that makes and sells artificial organs, or “artiforgs”. A repo man’s job is to track down people who cannot make their artiforg payments, which is essentially everyone who has one, because they are so incredibly expensive and almost always purchased on obscene credit plans. Then the repo man reclaims the artiforg by cutting it out of the person’s body on the spot, almost always killing them in the process. Remy and Jake are the best repo men in the business and wear it proudly with tattoos on their necks, designating them as Level-5 repos. Considering that nearly everyone absolutely despises repos, you’d think they wouldn’t want to advertise their deeply unpopular profession in such an obvious manner, but oh well, it’s a matter of pride I guess.
One of the people very much against the repo business happens to be Remy’s wife who gives him the ultimatum to either find a new job, or she will find a new husband. Remy loves his wife and son, but apparently not enough to keep him from allowing Jake to repo someone right in front of his house during a neighborhood barbeque. This throws his wife over the edge and Remy finally relents and agrees to transfer to sales instead of the repo end of the business, but not before doing one last job of course. While preparing to repo a famous recording artist (who you’d expect to have the money to make his payments, right?), Remy’s defibrillator goes haywire and electrocutes him. When he wakes up, Remy is horrified to learn that his boss, played by Schreiber, has given him an artificial heart. Remy is now forced to stay in the financially lucrative repossession trade in order to make the payments on his heart.
Up to this point there is not much to fault the film with. The only real head scratcher is why so many of these future people have artiforgs. Certainly today, only fifteen years prior to the setting of the film, not even close to this many people have the need for replacement organs. It makes you wonder just what kind of lives these people are living. There is potential for an interesting subtext here that is not explored at all. What if the very existence of these artiforgs has made people grow careless about their health and physical wellbeing? How unsettling would it be if people just completely stopped taking care of themselves the way we do now because they knew that if something happened to them, they could have a brand new artificial replacement that would never die or weaken from years of continued abuse? This decay of human life and society in general would of course be at the extreme benefit of a few huge corporations that produce artiforgs. If the writers took this direction they could have elevated Repo Men to a whole different plateau, but alas, what we are left with is a stock script that doesn’t even approach its potential.
I feel somewhat conflicted about the rest of the movie from this point forward. After getting his new heart, Remy is unable to repo people anymore because all he can think about are the lives and families that the people he cuts open will leave behind. However, he has no such remorse about the dozens upon dozens of people he kills in brutal fashion while trying to escape the repo men now hunting him after he quits the business and faults on his payments. This logical lapse is actually justified and explained by a major twist at the end, but still doesn’t feel right due to the length of time that elapses before the twist.
Of far greater detriment are the one-dimensional characters that make the film feel lifeless and flat at times. Just about everyone has a crudely envisioned, cardboard cutout of a persona that moves the script along, but otherwise contributes very little. Jake is a simple minded friend/assassin with a singular focus in life (to repo as many dudes as possible and have a damn good time) that would have been much worse had someone lacking the talent of Forrest Whitaker played him. Even a lesser twist where we learn just how involved in the events Jake has been since the beginning fails to create any real dramatic tension. The character is just too under developed.
Liev Schreiber does just alright in the same role that either he or Danny Huston plays in all of their films. These two guys must have some kind of agreement in place where if one of them is unable to take the role of detestable corporate/government head honcho in one movie, the other will still be available (wow, wasn’t Wolverine great?). Schreiber does enough to get by here, but yet again there isn’t a whole lot for him to work with.
Even Remy doesn’t seem fully fleshed out. Jude Law turns in a solid performance with what he is given, but for what should be a very emotional and conflicted character, Remy is still kind of empty. He never seems all that upset about losing his wife and son due to his stubbornness and changes from being the repo-to-end-all-repos into a man hell-bent on destroying that system in the blink of an eye. None of the angst someone his position would be feeling is present.
The other major player is Beth (Alice Braga), a singer who Jake sees perform early on and later shackles up with on the run. On the contrary, her character actually feels adequate, but also entirely implausible. Nearly every organ in Beth’s body is an artiforg. She has artificial eyes, ears, knees, kidneys, liver, lungs, the whole gauntlet. There is a scene where she and Remy sit down and she tells him the story behind each and every one of her organs. Just what in the hell has this woman been doing with her life!? She looks almost completely unblemished on the outside to top it all off. I suppose all of her transplants are technically possible given the medical technology in the film, but it still felt like too much of a stretch to me.
With its myriad of problems, Repo Men is far from a great movie, but it has a good cast and some innovative ideas that make it highly entertaining.
Overall: 6 out of 10
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Written by Eric Garcia & Garret Lerner. Cinematography by Enrique Chediak. Edited by Richard Francis-Bruce. Production Design by David Sandefur. Music by Marco Beltrami. Also Starring: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga, and Liev Schreiber.
