I Would Like to See It: Repo Men

Repo Men contains somewhere within its biomass perhaps one fifth of a good movie, but much like the quick and dirty surgery its titular operatives perform to extract foreclosed-on artificial organs from the bodies of their victims, prying that fifth out isn’t much fun. The film’s uncomfortably close to reality satirical premise of a world in which megacorps prey on the debt of transplant recipients winds up swamped by unimaginative action sequences, largely tepid ripoffs of OldBoy’s justly famous hallway fight, and a paint by numbers romance with little to justify its presence. As the largely artificial former singer Beth, Alice Braga is one of the film’s flattest notes, but even the typically excellent van Houten, Whitaker, and Law struggle to do much of anything with Repo Men’s dull script.

Remy’s (Law) voiceover narration offers neither depth nor humor. In one particularly irritating sequence he monologues aloud about his reasons for helping Beth to detox from her drug addiction, musing on what even the least attentive viewer could pick up without trouble as though it were somehow obscure or in doubt. The visual flair Sapochnik would later demonstrate in his work on Game of Thrones is here little in evidence, his depth of field constricted, his shot composition competent but largely uninteresting. Repo Men never takes a chance when it can rubber-stamp a scene or character instead. Beth and Carol (Carice van Houten) are so one-dimensional as to be almost afterthoughts, and even the film’s sets feel largely cut and pasted from stock photography.

There is some decent work in Repo Men’s depictions of the stress and avoidant dissociation of living with inescapable debt, and some gestures toward a thoughtful analysis of the cop mentality and the violent, socially stunted bonds between officers. RZA offers a fantastic and deeply affecting turn as transplant host and soul musician T-Bone, a man who greets his own death not with a wink or a grin but with tired, easygoing acceptance. “Can I at least finish this song?” he asks Remy as the younger man blusters and blushes, overwhelmed to be in the presence of a favorite musician. It’s a cutting line, an allusion to both the importance and the uselessness of art at the end of the world. Pity the movie around it is mostly dead weight.