Repo Men
Repo Men is the ultimate triumph of style over substance, at least insofar as it has no substance whatsoever. Music videos, car adverts, receipts in the bottom of shopping bags; all have stronger narratives than this film, which is about two buddies whose job it is to repossess the cybernetic organs of customers who have defaulted on their payments. The costs of the organs are so astronomical that it seems like you’d have a better chance with no liver at all than an artificial one: still, a job’s a job, and it’s all good fun, as the cheerful montage of Jude Law literally tearing people’s hearts out makes clear.
Makes them sound like bad guys, huh? Not to worry; they’re not bad, they’re badass! In the conceptually moral void of the movie, the only way to make us stick with such repugnant characters is to amplify how cool they are, something which Repo Men takes such relish in that half the film might as well consist of Jude Law and Forest Whitaker walking in slow motion down the street to the “Oh Yeah” song from the end of Ferris Bueller.
At any rate, halfway through the movie Jude Law has “a change of heart” (very clever) and starts to see things from the point of view of the innocent people whose visceral dismemberment the movie has hitherto been encouraging us to enjoy. From this point on the new, pacifistic Law kills significantly more people than he managed in the first half, keeping things interesting with a shift in modus operandi from surgically eliminating credit risks to decapitating airport staff with hacksaws. Yes, in Act II Jude Law embarks upon a gruesome rampage directed exclusively against people who are just doing their job but without the extenuating circumstance of a chirpy Cockney voiceover heralding their every psychologically implausible action. Talk about having your cake and eating it! The movie is so mind-bogglingly uncritical of Law’s character throughout that it might as well have been directed by his mum.
Still, all’s well that ends well – only it isn’t and it doesn’t. The ‘twist’ ending is about as surprising as a gift-wrapped football, and only one-tenth as exciting. I could tell you what happens, but then I would have to start with a “Spoiler Alert” – and what an insult to your intelligence THAT would be! Forget GCSEs, let’s just divide the world up on the following basis:
1) The idiots who didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of Repo Men.
2) The idiots who did.
3) The people who weren’t paying enough attention. They are the only ones worth saving.