Repo Men, Another Wholesale Dystopian Future

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Tuesday, Mar 16 2010

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Repo Men
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
Universal Pictures
Opens March 19

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Another wholesale dystopian future, just like the last one. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are two repo men punching their timecards for The Union, Inc. Their job is to hunt down those recipients of synthetic organ transplants who've fallen behind on payments, then retrieve company property at the point of a scalpel. (The movie shares this premise with 2008's Repo!: The Genetic Opera. It would be worth researching who ripped off whom if both weren't ghastly.) An on-the-job accident spins Law into midlife crisis; with no stomach left for the bounty-hunting game, he decides to drop out of corrupt society with a Hope Sandoval impersonator (Alice Braga). In its 15-hour runtime (author's estimate), Repo Men's nearest thing to an inspired moment is a wound-fisting love scene that might at least appeal to invasive surgery fetishists. The film's vision of mercenary foreclosure may have passed as "eerily prescient" had it been released somewhere in range of when it started production (fall 2007!). As it is, this is a poor man's Daybreakers—a phrase I'd hoped to go through life without saying—a supercilious inhumanity-of-the-system fable that the invisible hand will mercifully sweep into discount-DVD oblivion.