[scifinoir2] ‘Repo Men’ bloody but funny

[brent wodehouse]

http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Reviews/R/Repo_Men/2010/03/18/13275526.html

‘Repo Men’ bloody but funny

By LIZ BRAUN, QMI Agency


Here in the future, you can have any body part replaced with a man-made
gizmo. There’s no waiting list and no hoping someone will die for the
organ you need to be donated - it’s all man-made, it’s all available and
it’s just a matter of paying for it.

Ah - paying for it. There’s the rub.

Repo Men is a bloody, violent and blackly funny movie about the men who
turn up to reclaim your organs if you don’t pay the bill. Armed with large
knives and sanitary plastic suits to keep the blood off their clothes,
these guys taser you, open you up, remove your high-tech heart or liver
and take it back to headquarters to collect the bounty. You? You die
quietly.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker star in Repo Men as a tag team of
organ-retrieval specialists. There’s no case too tough for these two, and
they spend their working days seeking out those who can’t pay the bill and
snatching back the debt-causing organ. Neither man flinches at removing
anything from anybody, and they trade quips as they go. They have no
sympathy. Slice, dice, yank out kidney, move on. Yerghh.

It’s all in a wildly bloody day’s work.

Then Law’s character has an accident at work and requires a heart
transplant. Funny thing is, once he has a newfangled organ, he just
doesn’t have the, well, heart to do his job any more. He can’t bring
himself to stun people and rip out their unpaid-for organs. Furthermore,
he can no more afford payments on his own new heart than fly to the moon,
so in a matter of months he’s in the same position as his former prey:
Running for his life from repo men. For company, he’s on the run with a
jazz singer (Alicia Braga), a woman who is almost completely man-made.
She’s got custom lungs, liver, kidney, knees, you name it.

What it takes to bring Repo Men to a close is plenty of running, hiding
and fighting, and in scenes that are a bit like Blade Runner if it had
been a slasher film. There is so much cartoonish bloodletting here -
involving guns, knives, hacksaws, axes, mallets and hammers - that after a
while becomes a spurting blur of opening arteries and severed limbs.

The movie, which gets really bogged down in unlikely events (such as
romance) in the third act, has a nifty ending that makes up for a lot that
came before it. There’s no denying, however, that the movie is too long
and too short on story.

Repo Men is full of bad language, bad behaviour and really over-the-top
violence, but it can still make you laugh out loud on several occasions.
It’s a subversive little outing with a terrific soundtrack and a
‘do-unto-others’ moral, and it might appeal - just a hunch - to a young
male audience.

(This film is rated 18A)

liz.br...@sunmedia.ca