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Straight lemons: Miguel Sapochnik's REPO MEN

 Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber, Alice Braga. Dir. Miguel Sapochnik, Universal, 2013


Building a movie collection through thrifting/scavenging, I have to gamble. I find plenty of stuff I recognize and kind of remember hearing about but I'm not sure, so if it's a buck or two, I take the chance. Sometimes, like with THE BEAST or SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS or LOGAN LUCKY, I go home a winner.

Sometimes, alas, I also get movies like REPO MEN. If REPO MEN only sucked, if it started bad and went nowhere, that would be one thing. A straight lemon. 

REPO MEN, though, started out cherries, an intriguing premise, good cast, cool-looking dystopian world, and built my sympathy with Jude Law's Remy, an artificial-organ repo man, sent out to repossess hearts, livers, pancrii et al whose recipients can no longer pay. The recipient can be transported to an ER, but only patients with good credit live.

Law kills people for a living, with legal sanction, but most of society, especially the upwardly mobile middle class to which Law's wife, Carol (Caroline van Houten) wants to belong, despise what he does, and him and his best friend, Jake (Forrest Whitaker), by extension. Carol wants Remy to move into sales for the biotech company which manufactures and sells the organs he repos. Jake and Remy see that as hypocrisy, and their boss, Frank (Liev Schreiber) doesn't want to lose his best worker. 

From the start, Law plays Remy as a doting father and husband who is also, at times, not a nice man, at all. It's a promising dichotomy, and its consequences in their world feel real and dire.

Until, in the middle of killing a compliant musician, played by the RZA, Remy shocks himself, instead, and suddenly the frame freezes, and we're launched into a frenetic, jazz-scored flashback montage of Remy's history of KOs, replete with crazy topless strippers, and the movie's tone turns on a dime from a cool character piece to this smartass-scifi-actioner that plays like two separate pieces. Remy is traumatized to discover himself now a heart recipient, and thus a client as well as repo man, devastated when Carol shuts him out of their family, and is torn by the dilemma.  Meanwhile Schrieber and Whitaker turn into the guys from OLD SCHOOL, their scenes suddenly excuses for t&a or random gore. 

I went from liking and being interested in these characters to thinking Law a contemptible fool, Whitaker and Schreiber just contemptible, in the space of about ten minutes. I bought REPO MEN, invested in it, and now feel ripped off and disappointed. 

Critics loathed REPO MEN, too, so it's not just me. The few remarks I saw online don't capture the number the picture does on a viewer's expectations. The first half hour of REPO MEN plays like a dream, blackly comic, gory, smartassed, Law doing voiceover narration as only Law can, Whitaker ringing changes on Yaphet Kotto in ALIEN, and then - 

what the fuck? Why is the screen full of naked people and loud music? What's going on? The RZA looked ready for a spiritual epiphany, go back!

Nope. It goes forward into being a snarky gorefest trying to distract me from understanding it's a classic you-can't-ever-quit-the (fill in your pick here: cops, mob, unspecified and morally-dubious "business") picture. REPO MEN wants to ring some cool changes on a "you can't quit, man, you're the best we've got" storyline, but someone at Universal convinced GAME OF THRONES director Miguel Sapochnik to ring them with plenty of splatter and naked sex-workers. 

Which he does, utterly wrecking a sweet setup and promising payoff in the process. GoT never shied from gratuitous flesh&blood, yet I get the feeling Universal's fingerprints are all over this crimescene.

REPO MEN committed an unforgivable offense. It disappointed me. I'm ok with movies that anger me. Some of those, I can at least argue, were effective. Movies that disappoint me, however, that don't deliver on their promise, and for no good reason, become my sworn enemies. No forgiveness. 

REPO MEN, for its 20 minutes of high promise, earns a special place on my list. Fuck this movie. 

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