Repo Men

I have no problem saying that I recommend certain people go see this movie, and that I completely and totally hate it. It’s hard to pin down exactly how I hate this movie. I mean I love everything about it. The acting is great. The screenplay is witty, but not that unbelievable kind of Wes Anderson no-one-in-the-world-is-really-this-witty kind of witty. But it’s kind of like… imagine eating a hamburger. It’s big and juicy and is soaking your hands and threatening to ruin your favorite Dallas Cowboys t-shirt, but it’s ok because you can always get another t-shirt. A burger like this only comes around every few years. You’re halfway through the most awesome burger ever, and you start thinking about what you’ll post on Facebook… should you talk about the perfect pickles you’re crunching on, or the bun? Or do you mention the perfectly salted, still a little mushy french fries? And you’re finishing up and about to pop the last little bite into your mouth, and the waiter comes by and mentions that your burger was prepared by starving children from Guatemala and made from the meat of your recently dead grandmother.

So, yeah, I recommend that whoever would eat their own grandmother with onions and pickles should go see Repo Men. Like I said; it is pretty tasty.

Repo Men starts off with a pretty clunky in medias res, where Remy (Jude Law from television‚Äôs “The Tailor of Gloucester”) sits in an abandoned hotel writing his memoirs on an old, busted typewriter, presumably on the run from his former employer. The rest of the movie however, plays in a traditional linear arc that follows Remy through his fall from an √ºber-successful repo man with ‚ÄúThe Union,‚Äù to being an outlaw himself. Without giving the year, the movie starts up in an obvious future world in line with¬†a universe from the likes of RoboCop or Blade Runner ‚Äì it‚Äôs dingy and dirty, but there are really clean spaces for rich people, and the cars still run on wheels. And, being the future, there are scientific advances, the headliner of which is the creation of bio-mechanical artificial organs: Artiforgs (an idea borrowed from Philip K. Dick‚Äôs Cantata-140, where in the year¬†2080, interplanetary travelers needing new Artif-Orgs are just a normal part of life). Artiforgs are more expensive than most houses and require special financing to purchase (playing off the current worldwide economic struggles, the movie makes it obvious that many, if not most, Artiforg recipients are delinquent on their loans), and if you are unfortunate enough to fall three months behind in your payments, a man like Remy will come and repossess.

There‚Äôs also the interesting bit of trivia, that this movie shares a vision with a previous film ‚Äì in 2007, Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich put together a movie with Saw 2, 3 and 4 director Darren Bousman called Repo! The Genetic Opera. While you have to give a trump card to Smith and Zdunich (they first performed Repo!, their small theatrical play, on stage in Los Angeles in 2000), Eric Garcia‚Äôs novel, The Repossession Mambo (upon which the movie is based) was developed completely independently of the small stage production and the larger movie. Sometimes that kind of thing just happens. Stephen King wrote his bestseller Cell and Scribner published it January 24, 2006 just about one year before the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, which premiered an indie horror film called The Signal. The two separate stories share similar plots of a transmission which¬†piggy-backs cell phone signals¬†in the case of Stephen King’s Cell¬†and television¬†transmissions in the case of The Signal, and in both stories, the victims of the signals are driven homicidally insane. The same is true of the invention of the light bulb. While Thomas Edison was working on his ideas to create the incandescent light bulb, English physicist Joseph Wilson Swan developed a light bulb using carbonized paper filaments and a partially evacuated glass bulb. Thomas Edison improved the design by producing a more efficient filament and a more complete vacuum.

Remy’s own life is falling apart – his wife Carol (the famous Dutch television actress Carice van Houten) wants him to transfer from repossessions to sales for reasons that are not made clear, but presumably have something to do with her morals and personal distaste for her husband taking peoples’ organs and leaving them for dead. While not necessarily wanting to change careers, Remy seems open to the idea, but his best friend since grade-school, Jake (Forest Whitaker of Bloodsport and Battlefield Earth) is strongly against losing his friend to a desk job. However, the decision is made for all three when a repossession goes wrong, and Remy is revived in a hospital with a brand new artificial heart pumping blood into his body and money out of his bank. Seemingly having lost the taste for the horrors of the job, Remy can’t make any money, and being unable to make his scheduled payments, goes on the lam, thinking of himself as both alive and dead.

Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger’s Cat

For the purposes of the story, the idea of Schrodinger’s Cat works perfectly (for reasons which operate completely in spoiler territory). But for the purposes of plot, I disagree with its employment in the movie. I honestly felt that I was watching one of my favorite movies of all time play out right in front of my eyes, but was mistaken. Repo Men is a movie which, unfortunately, does not equal the sum of its parts. While all the aspects of movie-making from the songs and sound effects to the lighting and computer graphics are on display here in tip-top form, the end product is a movie that I could never stand to watch again.

Grandma

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