Not to be confused with the 1984 Emilio Estevez flick. That was Repo Man and was about repossessing cars, but in this one the story focuses on two people in the repossession business, hence the name Repo Men, but these guys don’t repossess cars, they repossess Organs. Not the musical kind, the human kind, although the organs aren’t actually human organs, they’re artificial human organs! Sound crazy! This is the year 2025 man, the world has gone completely bat shit crazy according to this movie.
Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker both work for a corporation called ‘the union’. They have weird little tattoos on their necks of the company’s logo. The Union has perfected the design and manufacture of artificial human organs. They sell them from their outlets to people in desperate need of hearts, lungs, livers, pancreas’ etc. They’re very expensive, there’s a scene near the beginning with a guy being sold a pancreas, $600,000 dollars, at something like 23% APR (I can’t remember over how many years, but still). However there’s a huge catch, you have 3 months, and if you fail to make a payment after 3 months the repo men will come and take your organ back. Simple!
It’s a cool idea but I don’t think the movie really gave me any idea of what the world, in which companies can get away with shit like this, is really like. If you fall behind on your payments and the Repo man shows up to take your heart back, you die. Apparently they are contractually obligated to ask you if you would like an ambulance to take you to the hospital once their property has been retrieved, but what good is a fucking ambulance when you’ve just had your heart removed, I can understand with knee caps, eyes, lungs, you know the bits you can get away with not having, kind of, for a while at least. But to take a dudes heart back, that’s guaranteed death! This is, in effect a form of legal murder. In 2025, under specific conditions, murder is ok.
The film really failed for me in this department, it expects you to just accept things as they are. There is no mention of ‘the unions’ standings on legal terms, or more to the point, society’s standings in terms of humanity! There is little mention of the health care system, but it obviously still exists, there are hospitals. But why do so many people need organ transplants and what exactly has happened to the conventional means? Yes there’s probably a waiting list, but there is right now in 2010. Did congress/parliament or whoever decides that they will change the law to give people another chance to live if the health system can’t help them and they can afford it, knowing that the company that provides the service will knowingly murder the people if they can’t keep up payments? Why the fuck aren’t doctors using these organs! If the technology exists, and people are willing to pay, why not incorporate these artificial organs into the main system? This movie had so many holes and questions about the world it was set in, seemingly the world we live in now, but in 15 years time. This movie is clearly stuck between the real world and an unexplained fantasy version of our world that they didn’t want to explain.
Granted if the film did set about describing this world in great detail, what has happened to healthcare, the legal system, politics and how it affects people’s everyday lives, how things have changed, why they have changed etc, it would ultimately have been a different type of movie and wouldn’t have really fit into this story. All the way through the film it suggests life is pretty much the same as it is now. This is either lazy writing or purposely left ambiguous to allow us to make our own assumptions.
The Characters are ok, likable up to a certain extent, but repo men, it’s a pretty gruesome profession and you’d have to be a certain sort of person to be able to do this job, this kind of has a negative impact on us being able to get behind these characters as they’re basically killers, but events in the movie swing this around. There is a subplot involving Jude’s struggling family life. He has a wife (Caprice Van Houten, Black Book) and a son (Chandler Canterbury, the kid from Knowing), his marriage is falling apart and his wife eventually leaves him after she catches Jake (Forrest Whitaker) carrying out a repossession outside of their house. She has been asking Remy (Jude Law) to move into sales and away from the repo department, she hates what he does and the hours he has to work, she wants a normal family life. Remy seems to have an ok relationship with his young son. However brief the events are surrounding his family, the drama that plays out is pretty good.
The inevitable eventually happens as Remy (Jude) finds himself in need of a new heart after an accident with one of those heart starting/stopping electric shock thingy-m-jigs whilst attempting to repossess the heart of RZA from the Wu Tang Clan. This ‘The Union’ must be a totally shit company to work for as they obviously don’t allow benefits for their employees, especially the dude that is considered the best at his job, so Remy ends up a customer as well as an employee, and the same applies to him, if he can’t make his payments one of his colleagues will show up and repossess his heart. Remy’s boss is played by Liev Schreiber, Liev is awesome at playing the good guy but bad guy or bad guy but kind of good guy, or just bad guy role he seems to play allot (Defiance, Scream, Manchurian Candidate). He doesn’t let down here, he knows Remy is good at his job, but he’s a customer now and he isn’t doing shit to help him.
Remy has to go into hiding in some abandoned building amongst other ‘past due’ recipients of ‘the unions’ products, he meets a woman who seems to be made up of about 80% union parts. Trying to save his live and the life of his (mostly artificial) new partner, he kills the first repo man sent out to retrieve his heart. This results in his best buddy Jake being sent out after him. Remy and Jake face off in a fight, and Jude takes a pretty heavy hit around the head, the movie cuts to a black screen to suggest the blow to the head, Remy then appears standing up all beaten and bloodied.
This was hard for me to swallow because the movie really takes you for a fucking ride now. I actually felt deceived by this plot, other people may think differently but I hated the ending to this movie, it was annoying. I’m going to spoil it, but I don’t think that really matters.
After the showdown with his best friend, Remy confronts his boss about clearing his account, but he had previously snuck into work at night to try and do this, unfortunately, his best friend Jake caught him in the act and the company heads obviously found out so all account information can now only be cleared from the unions main head quarters. It is also revealed that the heart unit malfunction was also rigged by Jake to cause the Injury to Remy to prevent him going into sales so he can keep his Repo job and they could get promoted, I’m assuming Repo Man pay is pretty decent, at least enough to pay off a $600,000 heart at 20% APR. Some best friend!
The Finale has Jude and his new woman infiltrating the union main head quarters to clear both their accounts as well as those of all other past due’er’s. This is like a heroes ending. Without being too specific in describing the events, he kicks a shit load of ass whilst he’s getting to the room behind the ‘pink door’ with the main database in; he’s a pretty tough cookie. Unfortunately there’s no interface, such as a keyboard to access the database so he must use a scanner to repo himself and clear his name. Forrest and Liev show up, Liev is about to shoot Jude, but Forrest stabs Liev in the throat with a knife and kills him. Explosives are used to destroy the union main frame hardware and all data is erased. Awesome!
Remy appears with his new best buddy and his woman on a tropical beach, the union tattoo has been removed from his neck, but the movie can’t end like this, it’s too perfect. What about all those people (union workers) he murdered (assuming murder isn’t totally legal), what about the state of the union? Hmm, I didn’t see this shit coming. It turns out that when Jake and Remy had fought after Jake had been sent out to repo him, that black screen we saw when Remy gets hit around the head was Remy receiving permanent brain damage. Everything we saw from this part had been Remy’s dream. There was a very brief mention earlier in the movie of a new product the union had been working on, a device which allows brain damaged people to live in a dream world, a somewhat perfect world. This was bullshit and totally pissed me off. I know deception is a very strong word, but the movie suggested all the way that the world was the same, everything carried on as normal, the slight changes that were most likely designed to make you question these events I actually accepted, this film could throw anything out at you and you’d just go with it, the ambiguity of this whole setup had put me in the “just go with it” frame of mind from the start, that’s quite a strong thing to say against the quality of this movie.
On the surface, the performances were excellent, nice photography, stylized with some pretty cool images, I loved the set in which Remy infiltrates the unions headquarters and we see the organ manufacturing facility, everything is white and uniformly arranged, the depth and vastness of the room looks infinite, obviously digitally enhanced but nice imagery. This is an entertaining but very grim movie. Pretty gruesome during the actual repossession scenes, It reminded me a lot of David Cronenbergs Crash, horrifying but watchable.
The director is Miguel Sapochnik, He did a very low budget movie back in 2000 called ‘The Dreamer’ according to IMDB, other than that he seemed to apply his trade as a story board artist over the years, so for a first feature with a budget, this isn’t bad. The writers were Eric Gracia (who also wrote the novel the movie was adapted from, and he wrote the novel version of Ridley Scott’s matchstick men) and Garret Lerner a TV writer (House, Boston Public, Martial Law).
Believe what you like about the world this movie tries to take you to, I went with it but I couldn’t help but question it.
