Starring
 Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber and Alice Braga

 

 

Repo Men

 

 

“Repo Men” is set slightly in the future, and is the story of a corporation that rents out organs (heart, liver, pancreas, kidney, even replacement knees), charges 19% interest on them, allows three months grace if you don’t keep your payments up, and then has Repo Men who take the organs back again.  It has Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber and Alice Braga as its stars, and I still can’t figure out whether it was meant to be a comedy or a tragedy.  I kept thinking of Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” where they’ve gotten the nose of the Great Leader and are trying to clone it and restore him to life.

 

I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that this is meant to be a tragedy, or at least a drama, because I didn’t laugh once during the film, where normally at a comedy I at least feel that someone is trying to make me laugh, whether I do or not.  Here Jude Law is, shall we say, all business, until he meets Alice Braga, someone who’s had just about everything in her body replaced, including ears and a knee, and decides to destroy the entire corporation, with its hundreds of goons all shooting at him (and missing, of course) as he finds his way into the heart of the company and – I know I’m giving this away – blows it all up, thus releasing all those replacement part from having to be paid for.  I don’t think the Tea Party people will be happy with this; because if you look at it one way it’s just going to add to our deficit, after all.

 

Law and Whitaker are partners as Repo Men, and Liev Schreiber is their boss, and Law holds onto a wishful dream that one day he will be a salesman of replacement parts – he does have a wife and a 10-year-old son, after all, and what kind of life is it to have your father killing people by the hundreds in order to take back their hearts and livers?  But soon his wife kicks him out of the house, he doesn’t have enough money to pay for his new heart, oh and I don’t think you really want to know what happens then, do you?  The only thing I’d say is that I didn’t laugh once.

 

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