This was a strange one, not because of the whole sci-fi artificial organ repossession deal, which I can buy into. This was strange because of a random mixture of sex, gore and an odd twist for the end. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker made this an interesting action movie, but it was really little more than a good action movie.
What I liked (caveat edition):
Law and Whitaker made this fun, and funny, to watch. They played their parts well and were passable as life-long friends, which is what made the twist at the end believable – not worthwhile, just believable.
The story overall was good, however it seemed like there was a lot of avenues the story could have gone down that would have been potentially better, but didn’t. The story kept hitting intersections, but it never seemed apparent why it never took a left or a right. It had a plot similar to ‘The Island’ with Ewan McGregor, however it had neither Ewan McGregor nor a meaningful ending, just a bizarre twist that left me wondering why I’d bothered to sit through the last forty-minutes of action.
The action scenes were a Matrix part 2/3 affair with choreography spewing from every knife hole, which consumed a lot of time that could have been used for either more comedy or more story.
What I disliked (unfortunately without caveats):
A hallmark of a bad writer is the reliance on a Deus Ex Machina to resolve a plot problem. We’re not talking Lord of the Flies usage where the entire novel revolves around them trying to get rescued and right at the crucial time they do, I don’t have a problem with that – if anything it’s less of a plot twist because it’s now frequently expected and can in fact be a rewarding end. No, I’m talking this is a War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise movie) ending where there’s no mention of disease and suddenly all the aliens die from influenza like they’re a bunch of Red Indians dragged into a Pox House, it was sheer irrelevance. Aside from a pre-mention or two of the literal ‘machina’ the twist comes out of nowhere.
I suppose the writer didn’t want a happy ending to the movie, which I can give kudos for but his form of a tragic ending was as irrelevant to the story of the movie as if the movie Bambi had ended with the faun taking a shell of buckshot to the chest. As many can probably assume, the twist was so horrendous that I’m actually taking personal offence to it because not only I could have done better, but anyone reading this could have done better and a monkey hammering away gibberish on a typewriter would have produced a more sensible ending.
Another thing that bugged me was the random sex scenes that appeared to have been contrived solely for the purpose of upping the rating. Yes we get it the bible thumping rednecks at the MPAA can’t stand to see sex and violence in the same movie let alone the same scene, and a sure fire way to get the highest rating is to put sex and violence in the same scene. Of course instead of killing someone and harvesting their organs while they’re rolling around with a hooker in the sack to offend the MPAA, the writer and director for Repo Men decided it would be excellent to have the main characters have a sadomasochistic sex scene while they cut each other open for no apparent reason other than one of the many plot adventures of “well we can’t think of anything else” that this movie frequently took.
The plot is akin to The Lord of the Rings without the ring, they just travel to Mordor to say “fuck you viewer!” It’s good until you realize Frodo left the ring at home because he just wanted some alone time with Sam in a scary place to see if the whole fear-of-death aspect would help get them to share a sleeping bag like it seems to every woman in any Hollywood movie.
Overall: 6/10
This is my lowest review score so far for two reasons. One is because I usually can tell if a movie is going to suck out loud, and this one didn’t suck out loud per se, it just sucks in hindsight. The other reason is that while it was an entertaining romp with multiple action scenes that were enjoying to watch and Whitaker’s believability is the only reason this didn’t get a 4/10 for pissing me off.
A review is supposed to be impartial, and I am. I don’t judge on film makers past works, their reputation or anything I judge a movie solely on its merits and I believe I’d have been less annoyed if you’d have strung every pun against the British from every Simpson’s and Family Guy episode together – in fact I can see myself giving it a far higher review than this movie. Standing on its own merits, if they’d have followed their non-sense policy of ignoring all the crossroads available to them in plot development and followed it to its logical conclusion it would have probably hit around a 7.5/10, but after skipping many logical plot alternatives they decide to take a completely illogical plot twist at the end in a Douche Ex Machina move by the writer and director.
If I can recommend anything to anyone on this movie is that it likely isn’t worth the price to rent it from blockbuster, and probably isn’t worth wasting one of your Netflix discs on when you could get an actual good movie.
Judgement: Wait till it hits TV or a movie channel.