The things we do for money and holiday houses...
dir: Miguel Sapochnik
2010
And here I thought this was a sequel to the classic flick Repo Man. Repo Man: a classic for the ages, from a kinder, gentler, punkier time when Emilio Estevez was briefly cool, and when Harry Dean Stanton, well, he’s always been cool and always will be.
Now that I think about it, a sequel or remake of Repo Man would be terrible, terrible in ways that would make you hate puppies, babies and baby puppy Jesuses. So perhaps it’s not too bad a thing that Repo Men has nothing to do with Alex Cox’s 80s alleged masterpiece.
Repo Men conjectures a hopefully unlikely future where synthetic organs are the most valuable commodity on the planet. In a parallel with the health care debate in the States, and the concept of whether people should actually be able to live even if they can’t afford what the medical profession would like to charge for its services, this flick envisages a time when companies can kill people with impunity.
They’re not killing them for a laugh on a Friday night: they’re just reclaiming their property, so it’s all legal. People enter into contracts to repay the cost of surgery and the new organs, and, if they can’t keep up their payments, become dead men and women walking after 90 days of being in default.
You, being all literal and knowing a little bit about contracts law as it has existed at least in the Western world for hundreds of years, you’re thinking: “This premise is bullshit: you can’t enter into a contract, a legally binding and enforceable contract where the penalties are criminal in nature, or where the end result is you being maimed or killed. It goes against the fundamental precepts underpinning the whole legal system.”
Spoilsport. Killjoy. Reasonable thinker.
This is science fiction. It’s speculative. It doesn’t have to conform to actual reality, it just has to conjure up this recognisable world and shift it enough to be believable yet horrifying. You know, like watching reality television.
In case you never believed so before, people being hunted down and having their organs ripped out legally, and with governmental sanction, is actually a bad thing.
You got that? It’s BAD. It hurts people, wrecks families, and it’s bad for the carpet.
Our lead character, however, doesn’t actually realise this until after he’s butchered hundreds of people, and even then, it hasn’t really sunk in. Until, of course, the shoe gets thrust onto the other foot, as the Hunter Becomes the Hunted.
Remy (Jude Law) is an ex-army thug who is the star repo man working for The Union. Now, this The Union is not all kind and gentle like the trade unions or the ones still run by the mob: it is a medical corporation so powerful it makes its employees get a tattoo on their neck, indicating that they are all owned by The Union. Remy’s boss Frank (Liev Schreiber) is the oily motherfucker who always seems to be the head of the evil corporation in flicks like this. He has not a scintilla of emotion regarding the people who his men butcher in order to retrieve The Union’s property, and is concerned only with turnover, and results. The beauty of their unlikely business model is that once retrieved, the same synthetic organ, called an artiforge, can be resold, and therefore remortgaged.
Remy may seem dumb and unaware, but as the pointless voiceover narration keeps telling us, he’s not that dumb, because he has a vague understanding of the uncertainty principle as enshrined in the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox. Now, I’m not going to pretend I understand it entirely, though I do know it’s about quantum mechanics and entanglement and such, but when Jude Law is mumbling through a bullshit rendering of it, in that dumbed down pseudo-Cockney accent he uses for American movies, all I could do was shake my head in disgust.
I had more of a problem with that than I did with anything else that happens during the length and breadth of this flick.
His shrew of a wife (a thankless role for the great Dutch actress Carice Van Houten, who I remember from the World War II spy flick Black Book), complains and complains and complains and complains throughout. It’s the kind of role they always reserve for wife characters, as apparently husbands in the real world never nag about anything. I’m glad she got a hopefully hefty payday, but good goddamn is her role awful.
The reason they want her portrayed as a horrible bitch is because when Remy hooks up with the real love interest in the flick, being a drug addict with lots of implants (but not the airbag, chest mutilating variety, I hastily add), we’re supposed to be okay with it.
Let me get this straight: we watch him brutally killing and dismembering people, and we were going to have a problem with him cheating on his wife?
For reasons too boring and too idiotic to reveal, after spending time with legendary producer and Wu Tang Clan founding member RZA, Remy ends up having a synthetic heart implanted in his chest. Not only does he have an unpayable debt to service now, but they also implanted a conscience in his chest as well. Despite needing even more than ever to harvest (ie kill people), he cannot perform anymore, and so the repo men are going to come after him too. He has one friend in this world called Frank (Forest Whitaker), also ex-army, also a repo man, and what are the odds that they’re going to have a final confrontation?
There is a sense, in watching this flick, that you’re watching a flick that has been constructed from the discarded bits of other earlier slightly futuristic urban dystopian flicks. It’s okay to be reminded of Blade Runner, or Brazil, or every other generic actiony sci-fi shot in Canada in the last ten years. It’s not okay to be watching something that makes you think, “Jeez, reminding me of Blade Runner just makes me think that I’d really prefer to be watching Blade Runner instead.”
Repo Men is not completely crap, and has an interesting premise. I don’t know if they did the best with it, since there are long passages that could have been cut out easily without detracting from anything. There are elements of strange body horror (that look like David Cronenberg should have been involved) with the way that people in this future routinely cut themselves and each other open, as if they’re performing routine maintenance on a computer or a car. There’s even a scene where a nine-year-old Chinese girl performs surgery. The film also has an almost gleeful level of gory violence in it, which conflicts only with the bullshit premise that Remy is born-again as anti-violence after his surgery. This only lasts long enough for the next brutally violent action scene to be set up. The funniest / most shameless of these deliberately recalls the famous corridor scene from Old Boy, complete with someone handing the protagonist a hammer, and looks as violent as it is cheesy.
It’s cheesy like a bad pizza. But even bad pizza has its place in this world. For all the flick’s pretensions to meaning and importance, it’s really a throwaway action flick with a simultaneously cop-out and down-beat ending which conflicts with the basic premise of the flick.
Killing people is bad? Killing people for profit or for their organs or both is bad? Who the fuck ever realised such a thing before this flick came out? No-one, that’s who, because no-one needed schooling on this particular topic. Sure, we can expect corporations to do whatever they can for fun and profit, but hopefully they’re going to find more convincing ways of doing so instead of sending Jude Law after you.
Jude Law may or may not be a good actor, that’s not for me to decide. I’ve probably seen him in stuff I’ve liked (like Enemy at the Gate, that awesome Stalingrad sniper flick), and stuff that I’ve hated (Cold Mountain, The Holiday, Alfie, probably a bunch of others). In this flick there’s probably not a moment where I found him convincing in the slightest. I didn’t buy for a moment that this was a butcher of men, or a remorseful butcher of men, or an intellectual masquerading as a thug, or vice versa.
To call him miscast would detract from the future usage of the term. Casting Paul Reubens, better known as Pee Wee Herman, as the next Batman: that would be miscasting. Casting Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great, or Val Kilmer as his father Philip, or Angelina Jolie as his mother Olympia using a Russian accent: now, that was sublime miscasting, three for the price of one, or eternity. But sweet, fucking, festering hell is Law ever miscast. And don’t get me started on Forest Whitaker. Forest fucking Whitaker. Sure, you were good twenty years ago, but what have you done for me lately, Ghost Dog?
Everyone except for Liev Schreiber is miscast in this, but it doesn’t really matter. And whilst Alice Braga, a Brazilian actress who I am beginning to see pop up everywhere, and think is wonderful, is miscast too, she brings this sly good-natured quality to the flick, which I don’t mind at all. None of it matters because this is a generic action sci flick that’s okay when it’s moving, and dull when it’s not. Any further criticisms I could make are obviated by the ending, which makes any structural or plot issues moot, because, probably wisely, the makers decided to give it a have-your-cake-and-fuck-it-too ending. If you ever see it, you’ll know what I mean.
But let’s not, and say we did instead.
6 times the scene where they’re trying to scan each other’s organs could have been brilliant in the hands of Cronenberg, but instead comes off like squeaky, oily cheese out of 10
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“Give me your fucking heart!” – ah, the desperate and all-consuming search for love, Repo Men.
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