In
any other conversation, the words sick, twisted and gross are usually
considered or portent a bad thing. That conversation would take place in
the world outside of Hollywood. On the silver screen, sick, twisted and
gross could equal a major box-office blockbuster. With its combination
of martial arts action, dark humour and a futuristically feasible sci-fi
storyline, Repo Men could very well be one of those films.
As
commonly done with one’s car or home, in the future if you are
unfortunate enough to require an organ transplant, you can finance a
replacement part. No longer will a desperately needed kidney or liver
be out of reach. Waiting lists for natural organs are a thing of the
past as artificial ones can be purchased through a company called The
Union on a payment plan. These mechanical marvels come at a high cost,
and, as with your house or vehicle, if you happen to fall behind on
payments, you’ll have to give back that mortgaged lung or heart. Remy
is one of the best at what he does. It’s his job to retrieve those
delinquent organs from late-paying clients. Armed with taser darts and
a satchel full of really sharp knives and scalpels, Remy employs a rib
spreader to dig in and yank a metal liver out of a temporarily stunned
target with the skill of a surgeon. The on-the-fly operations are over
in moments and depending on what was repossessed, our victim is either
minus a functioning kidney or relieved of his suffering forever. “A
job’s a job,” is the motto of Remy and his best pal/partner in
repossession, Jake, as they dispatch those in arrears with the emotional
detachment of a sheriff posting a foreclosure notice on someone’s home.
It isn’t until Remy’s wife gives him the gate, unable to deal with the
horror of what her husband does for a living and his own interaction
with a faulty defibrillator that everything changes. The gamy wiring
gives Remy a new perspective about his chosen profession because now
he’s not just the company’s top repo man, he’s a client. He loses his
taste for pulling body parts out of people in the same situation that
he’s in and sure enough, the gigantic payments needed for his own
replacement ticker aren’t met. Remy is now one of those he hunted and
he goes on the run, hiding in short stay hotel rooms, grimy tunnels and
abandoned warehouses with other refugees in an effort to keep himself
and Beth, an almost wholly bionic young woman who shows him the ropes of
being on the lam, in one piece.
In
1983’s Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life, two men turn up at the home
of an old man who signed an organ donor card and demand his liver.
Despite his vain protests - “But I’m using it” - the gory extraction
sans anesthesia, shows the audience what he’s made of. What seemed so
absurd two decades ago is slightly less so in the grim outlook of Repo
Men. Taking place in a near future of haves and have nots, bedecked
with Blade Runner-esque backgrounds, Repo Men is more a cautionary tale
for today’s reality. As politicians here in the U.S. literally battle
it out as to whether or not to provide basic healthcare to all our
citizens; this world in which people are able to survive using
mechanical organs only if they can afford them doesn’t seem that far
flung. If people can legally abscond with your car in the middle of the
night for being shy on payments, then why not your liver? In the age of
Repo Men, there’s not much difference and certainly no particular care
as to what a human life is worth past the point of debt collection. As
Remy’s slimy boss, Frank (- played with unctuous glee by Liev
Schreiber) points out, the way The Union makes its money is by
people actually missing their deadlines - can’t get the organs back to
reuse if they pay in full. The hives of folks who simply can’t afford
their huge premiums gathering together in camps to run for their lives
away from the repo men is a logical result of the cold-blooded policies
that turns human beings into dollar signs. The more late organs
collected, the more cash for the repo men. The graphicness of Remy’s
extractions reduces these folks into pieces of meat with a prize inside.
The dire premise is leavened with darkly humourous flashbacks of Remy’s
life and what led him on his career path. Remy chimes in in voice over,
part narrator/part self-analyst to give us his self-effacing takes on
his foibles and the situations around him. Taking bits not only from
Monty Python (- The aforementioned sketch can actually be glimpsed on
a TV set.) and Blade Runner, Repo Men also shows influence from
other films like I, Robot in some of its futuristic gizmos (- I wish
there had been more) and Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy in its climactic
showdown between Remy and a few dozen of his former colleagues down a
long corridor festooned with many handy instruments, including, yes, a
hammer. The bleak humour would have been better served in the hands of
someone like Edgar Wright, director of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, but
manages to amuse at times. As does the oh-no-they-didn’t approach to
the graphic eviscerations necessary to retrieve The Union’s property; a
bizarre romantic interlude between Remy and Beth showcases an entirely
unsexy form of penetration as the two literally dig into each other with
barcode scanners to locate their various mechanical bits. The more
squeamish in the audience should be warned to keep away from the
concession stand for this one. The fight scenes are unexpectedly well
done with director Miguel Sapochnik listening to the wisdom of LMD and
keeping his camera relatively still. As a result, both stars Jude Law
and Forest Whitaker’s moves show up very believably though I don’t think
either would have been considered an action star before.
Some
unwieldy pacing at the beginning and middle and a dubious twist are the
flies in the ointment (Dear Hollywood, please cut it out with the
unnecessarily funky endings, luv Diva). Though it never quite hits
action movie nirvana, Repo Men is serviceable and entertaining, and if
you can get past the OTT gross-out factor, a fun time at the cinema.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
March
19th, 2010
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