A whirling dervish of blood splatter, viscera, and high-concept sci fi, "Repo Men" is a spectacular failure that has a lot of really interesting and entertaining concepts, but not only loses its way, but plummets off of a cliff into a lake of fire with giant jagged burning spikes jutting out.
The setup, as quickly as possible: in a vaguely dystopic future, a company called The Union offers the injured and terminally ill new life with synthetic organs bought on credit (at interest rates starting at 19.75%, we learn). In no condition to refuse, the populace is virtually enslaved by the company, and if the recipients cannot pay, The Union sends repo men to retrieve the organs, which can then be resold.
Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) are two such men, working on commission to track down the deadbeats and take back their organs. The more people they relieve of their financial burden (and most often their lives), the more money they make.
As you may guess, there's plenty of subtext with today's predatory lending techniques, outrageous interest rates and virtual enslavement to an uncaring system that rolls around in all the dough they've taken from the middle class and poor. This is where "Repo Men" is at its most interesting, but somewhere along the way director Miguel Sapochnik loses control of the wheel and the film descends into ultraviolent madness.
There's a bit of a twist that's really obvious enough to give away (though I'll refrain from doing so) that leaves Remy less than eager to continue his job. He flees his work and soon finds himself much like those he runs down.
The performances are silly and over the top, specifically Liev Schrieber as The Union's sleazy headman. Whitaker knows when to turn on the crazy, and Law has a madness in his eyes that says he's enjoying himself.
And really, for a guy Chris Rock once famously said was "in every movie Hollywood made last year," is there a more inexplicably anonymous movie star than Jude Law? Can you name more than 5 films he's been in?
The film is consistently gory with repo men literally digging into their victims to pull out artificial organs, but we could stomach the gore because it served the story (they were quite literally ripping the hearts out of their victims in a financial and literal sense).
Once the wheels fall off, it's a chaotic stew of guts and steel. At one point Remy is taking on at least a dozen men--executive types who had no idea he was coming, but were still armed with a variety of blades, and I'm sure I noticed one guy inexplicably wielding a meat cleaver. Remy literally had a spotter handing him random deadly weapons ranging from kitchen knives to hacksaws to hammers, which he used to brutally dispatch his foes.
And I haven't even mentioned the film's coup de grace, which starts with a fetishistic quasi love scene that would make David Cronenberg wretch, where Law and his lover are literally putting their hands (and other implements) inside of each other, grasping and clutching at each other in such a way we're not quite sure if they're in agony or ecstasy, and ends with a predictably trippy screw-with-your-head ending.
Interestingly, there's not a gun to be found in the film. The repo men have a taser-like device, but it seems reasonable that someone on the lam would find the nearest firearm, but no one does, and with no explanation why not (we could surmise guns were outlawed, but there's no mention of it I recall).
If "Starship Troopers" and "Minority Report" were people who met in a bar, binged on booze and cocaine that they bought from "Total Recall," and stumbled to the nearest roadside motor inn for a night of passion, the bastard love child that resulted would be "Repo Men."
Now is that a bad thing, or a good thing? Like most everything else in this film, it's both.