Repo Man was important because it was the first time the sub-culture of American Punk Rock had been portrayed on film in a way that wasn't silly, misinformed, demonized or clueless. Plus it had Charlie Sheen's brother and Harry Dean Stanton as a paranoid meth addict.
Repo: The Genetic Opera was a musical that some-fucking-how is okay for heterosexual guys to like. It's important because it was a 'goth' movie that, unlike every single other 'goth' movie ever made, didn't make the 'goth' sub-culture seem like the absolute bottomest of bottom rungs in any social hierarchy. For the record: 'goth' is the absolute bottomest of bottom rungs in any social hierarchy, despite their women being unfairly hot.
I apologize for beginning with a detour, but it's important for me to remember that good movies do get made on occasion. And also if you wound up here wondering if Repo Men is a good movie, you now have two much better movies to watch instead. Also and also the next time one of my friends watches a piece of shit like Repo Men and then recommends it to a self-diagnosed movie snob like me, I can have them read this, and ask them if they're okay with me sorta hating them for a while.
Before I begin: there is one single change that could have been made to this film that would have raised it from 'cataclysmic failure' to 'abysmal failure.' Happily, this is a change that can be made yourself. If for whatever reason you hate yourself and have your heart set on watching Repo Men, tell yourself the following before beginning the film: Forest Whitaker is a self-loathing closeted gay with a man crush on Jude Law. The whole fucking fiasco makes marginally more sense with this in mind.
At :30-:31 we see the most wholesome character in the film.
Now, on with the tide of spoilers!
The film begins with a sound-byte montage of news reporters screaming about economic collapse and war and recession and everyone being poor. That the director chose this very obvious 'subtle' jab at the current ongoing everything crisis to open his film seems like a bold and daring statement. Obviously the director believes he knows something about economics, government, business, military conflict and the alleviation of global human misery. Realizing, perhaps through innate wizardry, that this titanically pompous introduction is in a movie that managed to gross negative 15,000,000 dollars leads me to the conclusion that the director, Miguel Sapochnik, will be a member of the United States Congress in the near future.
In the first scene we see topless Jude Law (llllllllllllladies...) waxing poetic about Schrodinger's Cat. Unfortunately, he also waxes retardedly wrong about it. Does Jude Law think Schrodinger's Cat was an actual, literal cat in an actual experiment involving cat murder? Schrodinger's Cat was an illustration of a physics idea.
Jude Law then states that he's been obsessed with this thought experiment for years and still doesn't understand it. Since he still manages to be this fucking wrong about it that can mean only one thing: Jude Law's character is hopelessly damaged. He then resolves this internal quandary by removing a semi-conscious man's robo-liver while listening to salsa music on his iPod. To be fair, he did ask the guy if he wanted an ambulance. Since he's too brain damaged to know better he asked the guy after tazering him. Jesus, this is going to be a long fucking movie.
Cut to Jude Law driving a Volkswagon and describing his vocation to the audience. Well, to those members of the audience too cognitively challenged to make the connection between the title "Repo Men" and the previous scene of Jude Law repossessing an artificial organ. Repo Men's entire target demographic, in other words.
5 minutes in we roll credits. Last chance to take the film back to the rental place to try to talk them into store credit. No? Well, here's more fictional news about how bad things are on Jude Law's alarm clock that is also a television. Yeah, it looks fucking rough.
Family bullshit. Jude Law's married to a woman that resents him, together they have a son that will probably redeem Jude Law's humanity in a not-very-believable way later. Off to work.
After tazering and (presumably,) butchering to death a couple of people we're treated to more of Law's delightful voice over. All the owners of the organs he repossesses die, apparently. This segues into a tour of the office with the corporate commercials playing in the background. Thanks, Mr. Director. I totally never would have have imagined that a cutthroat multi-gazillion dollar industry could be cunning enough to hide behind the facade of a reputable and compassionate business and yeah, I get it. It's just like banks with home loans. Because banks are evil. Got it. Thank you.
Note to Hollywood: If you're going to cast Liev Schreiber in your movie and you want to create any kind of mystery or suspense, then don't cast him as the bad guy. He only has one gear: underhanded.
Cue witty office banter between Law, another repo man more obviously damaged than Law and Screiber being fucking underhanded while bags of robot gore are scanned into a computer. The love interest is then introduced via Whitaker's playful and totally not phallic stun-gunning of Law. According to the montage, Whitaker's character has been expressing his unresolved romantic feelings towards Law via violence for decades, it would seem. It also raises the question of why Law has made absolutely no effort to suppress his British accent since, according to the narrative, he's been in America since early childhood.
Law and Whitaker then stop at Law's horrible, nagging bitch of a wife's work to agree with her that she is, indeed, a horrible, nagging bitch. Whitaker talks about Law's testicles.
A commercial for a virtual reality spa they totally didn't steal from Total Recall plays on a blimp. I'm absolutely certain that the M.5 Neural Net will bear no further relevance to the plot. The soundtrack then reminds the audience that it is still 80 times better than anything else in the movie while Whitaker talks Law out of transferring to the 'not-butchering' department where, presumably, Law would meet a new creepy, violent best friend leaving Whitaker to die alone in his recliner, suffering a heart attack while jacking off to old MMA fights.
At a bar, after joking about organ harvesting their grandparents, Law is obviously lovestruck by a not very attractive or good singer. Whitaker, cursing his cowardice at his inability to tell Law his true feelings leaves to punch things. The singer, having attempted to croon "Cry Me a River" while making moon eyes at Law, will probably have no further bearing on the plot.
Returning home to his cold, vacant wife, Law attempts to instigate some romance while "Cry Me a River" plays on the radio. It's unclear whether this is to illustrate that Law is thinking of the sickly-looking singer from the dive bar, or that Law's wife knows he was out all night boozing and making eyes at the sickly bar singer, or if, as previously established by all parties, she's just a horrible, nagging bitch. Either way, Law's wife excuses herself to restock her vagina with ice cubes and centipedes.
Full of liquor and sexual frustration, Law wanders into his son's room to have a forced, clumsy dialogue drawing forced, clumsy analogies between the barbarism of the Roman Empire and the barbarism of American capitalism.
This movie is very, very bad at having a liberal agenda.
Cut to a happy barbeque with Whitaker, Law, various terrifying repo men and Law's wife and child. Whitaker excuses himself to butcher someone in Law's driveway. When Law's wife sees this her reaction is (for once justifiably,) horribly bitchy. Law's son films this. Wife and son leave, much to Law's puzzlement, him not being an intellectual giant and all.
Later, while driving around at night looking for past-due kidneys, Whitaker describes the M.5 Neural Net in greater detail, in case the audience missed the subtly of the previous attempt at heavy-handed foreshadowing.
Finding a cargo ship full of overdue organs using what appears to be an advanced supermarket scanner, Whitaker makes a valid point, saying "Wait a minute! Do we not have GPS in the future?" Seriously, if they're selling these organs for $750,000 at 20% interest you'd think adding a tracking device would be a pretty logical move. I mean, I can touch like 3 things, right now, with tracking devices, and I don't even live in a world with robot spleens or VR vacation packages.
Admittedly, this would hamstring the premise for the entire movie, but this is a fucking unrelentingly terrible movie. Check it out: Organ hackers find a way to bypass the security on artificial organs, leading to widespread black market organ dealing, costing the well-connected companies that manufacture them billions. Law and Whitaker are two good cops trying to bring down the organ pirates while wrestling with the notion that they may really be on the wrong side. As Law and Whitaker realize they have far more in common with the people struggling to survive in a world gamed against them than they do with the faceless corporations at the end of their leash they set out to bring down the system. Cue Whitaker's noble sacrifice so that Law and the plucky and strong-willed female lead can go on to complete the mission, etc.
That took like 2 minutes to come up with and A) doesn't involve the constant butchering of civilians to maintain the viewer's interest, B) is just as relevant with current real world events (piracy, intellectual property, consumer rights, health insurance, the systemic corruption of capitalism and so on,) C) doesn't require both male leads to be impossibly psychotic, and D) isn't fucking stupid. Back to the film.
After Rambo-ing up, L and W enter the ship and take down whoever these people are utilizing tazer guns, pulse grenades, knives, pipes and gleeful sadism. Mostly gleeful sadism. Really can't stress that enough.
Returning to Schreiber's Evil Business Office, our heroes report their glorious capture of 32.5 organs and a couple of price gun jammers that use made up science. All dialogue pauses while Schreiber very obviously hides the jamming devices among his personal belongings. He then offers Law and Whitaker the opportunity to do this 'professionally,' which would seem to imply an upgrade from 'callous professional murderer' to 'callous professional whatever's between murderer and genocidal madman.' Before Law can ask for a desk job instead Whitaker, terrified of losing contact with his unrequited love, tells Schreiber to keep them on the regular surprise surgery roster. Law looks conflicted about this development but keeps his mouth shut.
Whitaker then almost really tells Law his true feelings, but loses his nerve at the last second and begins babbling about 'rules and responsibilities,' while slowly reverting to his comical 'Macho guy who is not gay' defense mechanism. The entire undercurrent of Whitaker's performance is screaming "I love you, Jude Law! Put your dick in me!"
Law, realizing he hadn't talked down to the audience in several minutes treats us to another voice-over, in which he tells the audience that what he's doing in this scene is, swear to god, the thing he just talked about doing at the end of the last scene. At this point even I have difficulty believing that the people this was aimed at exist anywhere outside of the director's bloated sense of superiority, as they would have to have an attention span of less than one second and an inability to hold memory for more than five.
Anyway, Law is about to kill his last, uh, client, I guess, who is named T-Bone. Law claims to have been listening to T-Bone's music since high school. Since T-Bone, played by RZA, seems to be about the same age as Law, this creates the kind of paradox that would be the perfect opportunity to talk about Schrodinger's cat. They do not talk about Schrodinger's Cat. RZA explains music production to Law. Law manages to remember enough of his training to ask RZA if he would like an ambulance before stun-gunning and butchering him for once. RZA does a lot of coke. I think it's coke. It's red though. Obviously a drug, and no doubt the reason for the delinquency on his payments.It's almost a touching scene if you happened to be raised in a POW camp and think intimacy is when the guard tells you he pissed in your food before you eat it.
After exploding himself with his defibrillator unit, Law explains, via voice-overed flashback, how and when he had been rendered unconscious during his life. The first time was in the standard army test that involves being hit in the face with a baseball bat. Turns out Law has a "very small brain." Which explains, well, everything about his character. This led to him being put in a tank with Forest Whitaker, since there's only like 20 or 30 people in the military and he was bound to be deployed with his childhood best friend/worst enemy/gay lover.
Cut to a strip club after the war. Law and Whitaker are attacking the patrons with their trademark gleeful sadism when one of the patrons renders Law unconscious again. This brings us to his current KO at the hands of his own medical equipment.
Fade into a scene of Law regaining consciousness at the hospital with Schreiber looking underhanded and Whitaker looking like a gay guy trying really hard not to look like a gay guy. Whitaker points out that, even though Law's horrible wife isn't there, Whitaker would love to change Law's diaper.
To Law and absolutely no one else's surprise Law has been given an external robot heart, which will soon be switched with an internal robot heart once Law signs his soul away. Law freaks out, Schreiber gives Law the underhanded party line, because, y'know, evil business. Law pulls the cords to the external heart out and walks quite a long way considering there is absolutely nothing keeping his blood flowing at this point.
Returning home from the hospital, Law finds that his horrible, nagging bitch of a wife has packed his bags, changed the locks, and slams the door on Law's face when he asks to see his son. This is done to re-establish the Director's philosophy of 'A wink may be as good as a nudge, so why not emphasize every single point with a jackhammer?'
Law, of course, goes to crash at Whitaker's place, Whitaker being the only human outside of Law's wife and child that Law has ever had any kind of interpersonal relationship with since birth that didn't exclusively involve killing people for money. Whitaker, as one would expect, is both kinds of gay about Law sleeping under the same roof as him. Whitaker covers by talking about sports and hot Chinese women that are coming over to, uh, do sex with them. Yeah, they're gonna, shoot milk at us out of their bosoms, and uh, giggle when we take our pants off. Yes, dog, they are some fine looking 'harlots,' and it is going to be 'hot.' They're gonna, like, shave their legs and put on make up. And we'll be watching 'sports.' Because we're men. We're gonna have so much heterosexual sex with these 'hoochies,' that we'll run out of Astroglide. I mean condoms. Because I'm all about doing sex with women, dog. We should practice before they get here. Take your pants off, dog.
Cut to Law's Welcome Back party at the office. There is a stripper. She gives him the pink slip for his new heart. That is the entire scene.
Cut to Law breaking into a house for organ harvesting purposes. After rendering the debtor unconscious Law experiences a panic attack at the prospect of performing surgery.
Later, at the bar, as the repo men exchange war stories Law's voice over explains to the viewer that what we just saw was him developing a conscience.
Later, on the porch of his estranged family's house, Law is ignored by his wife, says hi to and hugs his child and has the door slammed in his face, again, by his horrible one-dimensional stereotype of a wife. He convinces his wife to open the door, but instead of talking, she hands him a Past Due notice. Before this scene even ends, Whitaker's voice from the next scene begins by explaining that Law never turned in the pink slip from the guy he didn't murder before. Whitaker then does all of Law's justification and rationalization for him as they share an intimate dinner and a bottle of red wine.
inter-cutting scenes of Law being terrible at a sales job, possibly due to either his complete lack of non-violent people skills or his tiny brain, Law explains to Whitaker that he's fallen behind on his payments and needs to make some money. Since the Past Due notice was given to him almost 20 seconds ago I assume this is to remind the audience that it happened and to explain what Past Due means. Or maybe the Director just doesn't think film-goers can read.
This is about the point in the film where everyone involved in its making officially stopped pretending to give a shit. First of all, they commit the cardinal sin of reminding the audience that much better films exist by showing a scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. I'm sure you know which scene. Second, Law states that if he doesn't come up with some money soon he'll be put on the 'to kill' list.
Okay, I understand that this is a science fiction movie set in a dystopian future. But no amount of 'it's fiction' can explain this set up. If the company sics a repo man on Law then it's at best even odds that Law kills his assassin. Since Law's supposed to be one of the best the odds are probably way worse than that. So the company will probably lose at least two repo men to reclaim one robot heart. Since the reclaimed organs are kept in the repo mens' locker room, they must not cost that much for the company to make. If you think about it, and I can't imagine anyone that saw this movie on purpose did, these repo men can't be cheap for the company. First of all, not many people are cut out for the lifestyle of human jackal. I mean, I don't think I personally know anyone that would, on command, kill a stranger, friend or family member because their boss told them too. On top of that they would have to be intelligent enough to perform surveillance, breaking and entering, detective work and field surgery. They would also have to be healthy enough to best the vast majority of people in all forms of combat.
What I'm saying is, the job requirements for being a repo man are so impossibly varied and specific that finding a good one would be next to impossible, and training one would take years and cost a small fortune. And we're expected to believe that this company will risk sacrificing as many as it takes to reclaim an artificial heart that they're just going to dump in a bin next to someone's dirty towel? When the logical solution would be to force the delinquent repo man into indentured servitude for the rest of his life?
On top of all of that, since the repo men seem to have a high level of security clearance (they barge into Schreiber's office whenever they want, for example,) that would automatically be an unacceptable security risk. A ruthless, heavily armed, well-trained, intelligent, remorseless and experienced professional hitman that you want dead is the absolute last person you would want having a high-level security pass and working knowledge of your operation. Who the fuck wrote this shit? Back to the movie.
Whitaker, tired of watching his possibly-lover fuck everything up by not killing anyone, takes Law to the slums to go on a surgery spree. Whitaker, after a brief tazer rampage, mama bears a couple of delinquents over to Law and pleads, teary-eyed, that Law please just get over this hump and kill these people. As fucked up as that last sentence is, it still does no justice to the level of fucked up in the movie. While wrestling with his inner demons Law is (understandably and deservedly,) beaten to shit by a group of transients. Law's voice over, which is becoming more and more of a blatant rip-off of Jason Statham's from "Snatch," reminds us that this is KO number four.
Immediately after waking up, Law walks twenty feet and finds none other than the singer from the bar, strung out on a pile of garbage, singing to herself. Whatever drug brought RZA down is at work here, I guess, since her teeth are stained red.
In a romantic scene filtered through the director's quirky view of reality, Law takes the singer to the nearest No Tell Hotel to kick, complete with seizures and vomiting. True love.
In a twist that should be familiar to anyone that's ever seen a movie or television show or read a book or heard a story before, it turns out that the singing Cu (or Q or Queue or whatever the drug is,) Junkie is 90% overdue robot. Law's voice over informs us that he interviewed a serial killer once. The why and when and who aren't explained, but he did use the experience to inform the audience that serial killing also works in reverse. Which I think means once you meet someone and don't kill them, then it will be easier to refrain from killing the next person you meet. The monologue seems to think this is some sort of abnormal state for a person to be in.
Returning from the store to the hotel, the junkie singer promptly does her level best to beat the holy shit out of Law for no apparent reason other than her script telling her to. Since Law is in wuuuuuv he's okay with this. I would like to point out that Law still has not had a single conversation with this character.
While using his security clearance to break into the Organ Warehouse to perform some shady looking tampering on a couple of robot organs Law's voice over starts talking about Schrodinger's cat again, and manages, somehow, to be even more wrong in an even insaner way than last time. Whitaker, of course, catches Law doing whatever it is he's supposed to be doing with the organs.
The Director uses this opportunity to allow Whitaker some of what he probably thinks is 'character development.' Whitaker explains that his uncle was a bank robber until he got caught after he went soft and was off of his game, Whitaker almost cries, Law symbolically lays down his tazer gun, they almost kiss, scene ends.
After breaking into his own house to tell his son goodbye, Law returns to the hotel to collect his violent, homeless drug addict soul mate only to find out that she thinks she can do fine on her own. Not really surprising since she, you know, had done fine until he came along. She changes her mind when she learns that he had cleared the recall notices on half of her dozen parts and none of his one and she instantly falls in love with his selflessness. He then lights his Volkswagon on fire so that he and the singer can look serious while being lit by the flames. That is the only reason they do this, since they immediately travel further into the functionally lawless and unregulated maze of the slums on foot.
After finding a suitable squat, Law's voice over reminds the audience that he has an artificial heart and she has an artificial 'everything else,' although if she was 99% Terminator she would be the Terminator that the other Terminator's would pick on and make fun of for being frail, slow and useless. Law's voice over then comes to the obvious co-dependent's conclusion that this means they must be two parts of one whole, verifying that she is, indeed, the shoehorned-in love interest, despite her having only half a dozen lines and five minutes of screen time at the mid-point of the film.
Next Time: The Second Half of This Awful, Awful Movie's Less Awful Synopsis
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