Set in the ambiguous not-too-distant-future, Repo Men stars Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as Remy and Jake, our eponymous repo men. However, they’ve been tasked not with repossessing cars but human organs. They work for an ominous company called “The Union” which specializes in selling extraordinarily expensive bio-tech organs to a clientele in desperate need of transplants. From kidneys to corneas, pancreases to prostates - The Union does it all. And, as if costing upwards of $600,000 weren’t bad enough, they also offer financing at an “affordable” 19.4% APR. By my calculations (I’ll save you the trouble) that would make your monthly payment, if amortized over 30 years, a crippling $9,730 per month. Fall more than three months behind in your payments and The Union will reclaim their property wherever they might find you…regardless of the health consequences. As menacing dystopian futures go, it’s an interesting conceit. Unfortunately, if you give it more than a sideways glance it quickly begins to crumble. [morelink]
The biggest problem with the premise is pricing. The Union’s business model seems to be based entirely on selling people something they can’t afford and then repossessing it three months later. No reference is ever made to health insurance (private or public). The burden of cost is borne solely by the consumer. If their goal was to siphon off a person’s life-savings before discarding them, wouldn’t it make more sense to set the price just barely out of reach? Instead the amount is so astronomically high, and the penalty for default so draconian, that it strains credulity that anyone other than the preposterously prosperous would even consider such a Faustian arrangement.
As Remy and Jake go about collecting human organs the movie attempts to have its cake and eat it too. In an effort to preserve our repo men’s likeability, we see them collecting from deadbeats and street gangs that appear to be using the technology to increase their strength. However, when we see people purchasing these last-ditch lifesaving measures, they are frightened, innocent victims of circumstance forced into agreements that they know they can’t fulfill. Remy begins to have a crisis of conscience when he’s forced to accept a replacement heart after being injured while repo-ing with faulty equipment. Apparently in the future not only will we all lose our health insurance, we won’t have worker’s comp either. The poor guy doesn’t even get an employee discount. Once it becomes obvious that Remy has lost the taste for repo, and therefore is unable to pay for his heart transplant, the movie becomes nothing more than an extended chase scene.
Somewhere in all this mess is one hell of a drinking game. Take a shot every time the movie rips off another (better) film: Blade Runner, Fight Club, Total Recall, Minority Report, Children of Men. And that’s just off the top of my head. As the film lumbers towards its conclusion it takes a surprising, though enjoyable, turn for the hyper-violent. It’s a slickly stylized sequence that makes you wish they had thought of it earlier. However, the moment is quickly lost as the film immediately follows with an oddly sexualized scene of sadistic brutality masquerading itself as heroics. And just in case you were willing to overlook all of its flaws, the movie pulls one final head-fake that’ll make you want to punch it in the pancreas.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Blade Runner and 1 being RoboCop 3, Repo Men gets a 5.
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