Repo Men – Review

You could feel the uproar vibrate your keyboard when word came down that Repo Men (formerly Repossession Mambo) was finally set to hit the big screen. Repo! The Genetic Opera fans went ballistic and hit the net hard with a campaign for moviegoers to boycott the film for what they called cinematic plagiarism. Based on the facts that are open to the public, the idea of Repo! goes back more than a decade with the first version called – “The Necromerchant’s Debt” – the storyline that paved the way for the cult film from filmmaker Darren Lynn Bousman. Whereas Repo Men is based on a short story about bio- repo men from Eric Garcia, a novelist for over ten years, who collaborated with Director Miguel Sapochnik on the screenplay.

Guess what folks? This has happened before and will happen again, and I really don’t see what the big deal is. For one thing, while I agree that Repo! The Genetic Opera has flashfire imagery that hits you right in the retina, the crooning is painful and kills any momentum the film has going for it. I’m sure that this sounds sacrilegious to all the die-hards out there, but I don’t care because I march to the beat of my own drum. In the end, this film bootlicked the Goth community and they took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Maybe the people who are doing all this complaining need to be reminded about the phenomena of comparable storylines that leap into production around the same period of time. Do you remember Volcano and Dante’s Peak? How about Armageddon and Deep Impact? There was also the three-peat that was The Abyss, Leviathan, and Deepstar Six. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Repo Men takes place in the near future where a biomedical firm called ‘The Union’  has set up business where you can buy artificial organs for a hefty price. You can make the payment on credit, but if you start falling behind on your newly found debt you don’t get sent to a collection agency. Instead, a ‘Repo Man’ will pay you a visit and slice and dice the artificial organ right from your body. Childhood pals and veterans of the war Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) are the best in the business. On a routine mission Remy suffers a heart attack after receiving a jolt of electricity from a ‘faulty’ defribillator.

Remy goes back to work and quickly finds out that he has lost his skills and suffers from a major case of surgeon’s block. No longer able to to do his job that he once excelled at, he is in a race against time to come up with the dough to keep up his payments or have his heart ripped out by his best friend.

There is one thing about Repo Men that you will never find out from just watching the ads. This flick has to do with a man who has lost his family because of his chosen profession. That, along with the almost buddy cop style banter between Law and Whitaker brought back memories of the comedic bromance between Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines in Running Scared - one of my favorite comedies. Those moments are far and few, and what we are left with is a hodgepodge of clichés and predictability.

Repo Men has its heart (no pun intended) in the right place, but it’s just so unclear on what genre it wants to be. The writing is flimsy and when you are genre hopping you need to tighten the script as tight as a sparrow’s ass or you will lose your audience fast. One minute it’s a sci-fi thriller and the next it’s high-tech horror. Repo! fans exult. You can drop the pitchforks and torches because Repo Men will not stain your modern day version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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