Repo Men

"Hey dad, why did Romans stone people to death?"
"Because they didn't have any guns"

The above exchange is delivered as a serious conversation between father and son, intended to reflect how the world has changed in Miguel Sapochnik's slightly noirish view of the near future. The quote demonstrates that this is a world grown callous, where characters don't have the facility to understand anything other than 'might is right'. It's meant to strike a slightly facetious chord with the audience, but it also (unintentionally) references the idiocy of the entire film. Repo Men wants to be a new wave Blade Runner, and has a plot that sounds like Logan's Run, but it comes nowhere near either of these two sci-fi classics due to a preoccupation with dumb, relentless action sequences and a serious lack of ambition when it comes to depicting the future. Aside from a few odd pop culture choices (such as the use of jazz, lounge music and traditional ska), and some flashy guns, there isn't really much to indicate that this is the future at all. I guess that's fine if you're going for a certain scary realism ala Children of Men or A Clockwork Orange, but in this case there's precious little else of interest so it just makes for a boring film.

In this not-too-distant future, Remy (Jude Law) is a 'repo man', a kind of bounty hunter used by a medical cybernetics company to repossess expensive artificial organs straight out of the bodies of those who can't keep up with their payments. It's a messy business but Remy goes about it in a fairly cheerful, working class manner, aided and abetted by his friend and partner Jake (Forest Whitaker). Predictably, things go belly up for Remy and he's forced to take on one of these artificial organs after a repo goes wrong. Soon he can't keep up with the payments, and Jake is sent after him to 'collect'. There isn't really much more to it than that, Remy finds an underclass of people who resist the company's tyranny, and there are endless excuses for some rather garden variety fight scenes based around the Filipino martial art of Kali. It's filmed in Toronto and feels like it's set in a post-war London of the future, but it's hard to tell where it's meant to be because there only the most cursory of historical details are given to establish setting.

Whitaker and Law are actually quite good together, especially in their use of gallows humour. Whitaker's character once repo'd his own grandad, and goes about the film with a you-have-to-laugh mentality as a result. Law's character is basically an 'onest-tommy wideboy thug, unwittingly callous and blockheaded. He's later revealed to be a writer, but this character detail makes no sense whatsoever in light of Law's performance and the working class nature of the character. It's a well-made and well-pitched film... the perfect sized story to look at themes of commercialised murder and GFC-esque debt, but it's not really all that exciting as far as sci-fi goes. Not enough explanation goes into how this world came about and how a bank can have so much control over life and death. There's no context given to show us how this degree of power got into their hands. And then there's the weird, goofy and anticlimactic ending - a really stupid twist that negates a good 40 minutes of the film... it boggles my mind that big budget filmmakers would ever think they could get away with a twist like this without seriously pissing off their audience.

LOWPOINT: For some reason there's a 'homage' to the famous hammer scene out of Oldboy. I put 'homage' in inverted commas because it's really just a rip off of an iconic scene, used by a western filmmaker who (probably rightly) assumes that the majority of a mainstream audience will be unfamiliar with the Korean film he's stolen it from.

DIRECTOR: Miguel Spochnik
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner. Based on a novel by Eric Garcia.
KEY ACTORS: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber, Alice Braga, Carice Van Houten, RZA, Yvette Nicole Brown

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Repossession Mambo, on which the film is based.
- Not to be confused with the '80s cult film Repo Man.
- For similar (and ultimately better) sci-fi films set in the future, see Logan's Run, Children of Men, Minority Report, eXistenZ, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, In Time and Surrogates.
- Eric Garcia also wrote the sci-fi novel Anonymous Rex, which was adapted into an even more poorly-recieved film than Repo Men.