Review: Repo Men (2010)

[Tim Skirvin]

  $10,804.47: that's the monthly rate to pay off $680,000 at a 19%
APR over 30 years.  Admittedly, I had to make up that last number; no
explicit repayment time was mentioned in _Repo Men_.  But the other two
numbers *were* mentioned early in the movie, quoting the price of an
artificial spleen to an apparently moderately-well-off man in his 40s or
50s.

  From that moment on, I spent the movie trying to figure out if the
units were off somehow, watching for indications of massive inflation.  I
never did see any; but my interest in the movie itself was immediately
gone.

  It can't be a good thing when economics is more interesting than
your story.

  _Repo Men_ (sadly not a sequel to the Emilio Estevez vehicle _Repo
Man_ from 1984) is a story about a man who reclaims those expensive organs
for a living (an apparently socially-acceptable job).  After he starts to
decide that maybe this isn't the job for him, he gets injured out on a job
and his bosses give him an artificial heart.  Soon enough, he determines
that he can't kill people for a living anymore, and is scheduled for
reclamation himself.  Cue _Logan's Run_.  

  There were a few good humorous and/or clever bits, and the acting
was fine.  Sadly, that's about all that was good.  The story was derivative
and uninteresting; the characters themselves were poorly thought-out and
uninteresting; and the action scenes were bland and, once again,
uninteresting.  The special effects mostly consisted of throwing a lot of
virtual blood around the screen.  There weren't any realistic or sympathetic
characters.  All in all, there wasn't much that wasn't bland and unlikeable.

  I know what would have saved it for me, though: fixing the numbers.
Make the price of a new spleen $68k at a 9% APR, and you've suddenly got a
business model that fits into the world; yes, there would be changes (ala
Shadowrun and various other Cyberpunk universes), but the idea that people
can scramble to afford an extra $550 car payment makes a whole lot more
sense than the idea that they can scramble to pay for an extra luxury
mansion.  Expand on the idea of the black market in organs - somebody
carrying around organs like that has got to be worth a fortune, making
muggings much more interesting!  And make the crux of this movie revolve
around an insurance case - the company *should* be paying for injuries
obtained in the line of duty in the first place, after all!

  Instead, the absurdities just cascaded.  There are
down-on-their-luck singers out there with eight separate replacement body
parts, including several internal organs (I'm willing to concede that
artificial ears and knees might be relatively cheap).  Nobody really seemed
to mind in a legal way that there were people wandering around cutting open
and killing people - well, just men, a line was apparently drawn somewhere
in production - in broad daylight.  Loans were still being given out to
people that couldn't possibly afford to pay them back, and in fact the idea
of a loan being paid back was explicitly poo-pooed.  There were automatic
tasers all over the place.  And so forth.

  Instead of a decent science fiction movie, we get a third-rate
thriller.  It's a shame to see producers more interested in some gross-out
scenes and stupid action sequences to explore what could be a fairly decent
high concept.  *shrug* I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

  Go see something else.

  * 3/4

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin at killfile.org)
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