Just Watched: Repo Men
I so wanted to like this movie. Forest Whitaker is one of my favorite actors and the premise of human organ repossession seems like something meaty enough to build a good movie around. I don't know what happened but the end result isn't good.
The first 30 minutes of the movie are promising. It's basically a montage of cold-blooded organ repossessions performed with a steely detachment by repo partners Whitaker and Law, justified with the oft repeated "A job is just a job". It seemed like the perfect setup for exploring the dark side of our profit driven corporate culture and the timely issue of predatory lending practices.
For some damn reason though they chose to ignore any of the more interesting political implications of their setup and decided to just make a chase movie. This starts when Law's character has an accident that requires he get an artificial heart and, when he is no longer able to afford it, the evil corporation sends his old partner Whitaker after him.
Unfortunately, it's not even a good chase movie. The later parts of the film lack coherence and don't add anything to the either the plot or what could have been an overarching message. The fight scenes are okay and there's a memorable 'love scene' where Jude and his new organ-transplant-run-away girlfriend have to dissect each other; it's weird and unique but mostly just gross.
Probably the neatest thing about the second half of the film was sighting actress Yvette Nicole Brown from my favorite TV comedy Community as a tough leader of a group of on-the-run dead-beats organ transplantees. In Community she's so nice and sweet and here she was a bad ass. It was fun to see.
Comments