Whatever Reposessed Me to Watch This?

Recently, I decided to take a chance on watching the 2010 sci-fi action movie Repo Men. Its a "near future" story in which artificial organs are repossessed by the manufacturer when their owners default on installation payments, killing said owners in the process. It seemed like a premise possibly prone to cheese, but also possibly a vehicle for some interesting social commentary. Plus, it starred Jude Law; I figured that I've liked him in a variety of films, and he probably wouldn't have signed on to a movie wholly without merit.

Of course, what I should have been focusing on was the fact that it co-starred Forest Whitaker, who after his appearance in Battlefield Earth, should never again be trusted to choose any script with any merits whatsoever.

There's no wry commentary of any kind. You just have to buy into the crazy premise, and then accept when the movie quickly turns into a mindless "run from the bad guys" mess done infinitely better in Total Recall. Or hell, done infinitely better in the still mediocre Surrogates.

This complete mess of a movie really has only two points in its favor: breakneck and inventive fight choreography, and cartoonishly hysterical gore. But even both of those modest successes are cases of rapidly diminishing returns. The gore shocks in the first instance or two, elicits laughter in the next dozen or so, then actually starts to bore the audience when it devolves into an apparent contest between makeup effects artists trying to one up each other. The fight choreography is intense, but ultimately just as boring by the time the end credits roll.

Oh, but before you get to those credits, you have to watch the utterly predictable ending, telegraphed from an hour and a mile away. A scene of hamfisted exposition early in the film, serving no apparent purpose to contextualize anything you've seen so far, is of course going to play in the obnoxious ending.

If you're a fan of gore, you might watch to be impressed by the work here. (Though even for such a person, I can't say I'd recommend watching it all in one sitting.) But even being generous, I might only rate this a D-. You really should all just steer clear.