Repo Men

Much to my chagrin, I sat down and watched Repo Men with the little lady other half last night.  I'm a lucky guy because she will watch anything, but on the other hand... she will watch anything.  I did not enjoy The Expendables, thankyouverymuch.  

Anyway, Repo Men stars Jude Law (who you have to admit looks a lot like a pissed off Dr. Perry Cox in this picture) and Forest Whitaker, so right off the bat I thought the movie might have potential.  That's not the case.  It's a mash up of the bad parts of Equilibrium, Minority Report and Vanilla Sky, to be honest.  Oh, and a buddy cop film thrown in, too.  (Not that you should care if I'm going to ruin the plot points for you, but spoilers are about to occur.)

Two guys, who happen to be some equivalent of emotionless ninja assassins, work for a company who are to go repossess the artificial organs that people have not been paying for with supreme knife-wielding skills.  They sneak into customers' homes, stun-gun them and cut out the organ, thereby killing them.  At some point one of these goes wrong and Jude's character ends up getting anew heart without his consent and is, for some inexplicable reason, expected to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to live.  Yeah, I guess they did away with workman's comp and medical insurance in the future.  Anyway, he has a moral dilemma because the the customers/victims are now just like him so he won't kill them anymore which breaks the bank and puts him on the hitlist.  He runs and hides (naturally, because everybody runs, right Tom Cruise?)  Meets a chick that he falls in love with faster than a speeding bullet and then joins the hundreds of customers who are in hiding.  Yadda, yadda.  He gets jumped by his former partner, they have it out and he gets away.  They attack the system and after some gruesome events, they destroy the system, live out their lives on a beach and hip-hip-hooray.  Turns out he didn't get away and that his partner hit him in the head during the Agent Smith/Morpheus fight scene, turned him into a vegetable, then placed a halo-device on him and that's what you had been watching the last half of the movie.  Raise your hand if you came to the same conclusion that I did.  Minority Report/Vanilla Sky/Equilibrium, right?

Wrong. Those movies were entertaining and they were made ten years ago.  Its been done, done and done and for the most part I enjoyed the acting in them. The plots made sense in a sci-fi way and nothing felt overly forced.  I didn't understand why anything happened in this movie besides a reason to watch some action scenes and really gross surgery.  A couple obvious things punched me in the face while I watched this that made me want to turn it off.

First, what moron is going to a company asking for (sometimes multiple) replacement organs knowing full well that this company sends the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad to violently rip your stuff out if you don't pay on time?  They make it seem that the company effectively hides this fact from potential clientele, but c'mon... this isn't on the news?  Additionally, there are hundreds of these people in the city and outside hiding in the ruins that have these organs.  Does this organ company not check credit scores before installing $600,000 hardware?  Doctors, random slobs, and junkies all seem to have these damned things.  Its not like they're mandatory installations at birth, they all opted into the program.  There's more of this type of nonsense, but I think you get the idea.

Maybe I just don't care for action movies anymore.  All I know is that the more I watch this drivel, the less inclined I am to do so in the future.  Every review should include something positive, though.  So I give the movie, I don't know, one star for having John Leguizamo and Forest Whitaker in it.  That's about all.