Repo Men vs. Repo!

Sci-fi is the perfect genre for exploring societal resentments between the powerful and the powerless because it takes our current reality and uses exaggerated metaphors to reveal the problems. David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven are two of the best at this, showing in Videodrome how violence-saturated media warps our minds and bodies, and in RoboCop how the swamp of greedy, unchecked capitalism can lead to fascism, where not even the police are safe from being mutilated and transformed into tools of oppression.

We need these movies because Americans are furious with billionaires keeping us sick and uneducated, buried in hospital bills we can’t pay off with our low-wage jobs. As a result, we don’t have the time or energy to organize and fight back. So what if you combined Cronenberg’s body horror with Verhoeven’s critique of capitalism, taking a premise like a for-profit healthcare company selling dying people life-saving organs at impossibly high prices then, when the patients inevitably fall behind on their bills, slices them open and yanks the organs right out of them. And also made it so sterile and dumb that it leaves you feeling nothing at all? And what if you made that movie twice?

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Repo Men

Repo Men introduces us to our two main characters brutally and gleefully butchering their victims. Jude Law’s character sneaks into an apartment where a couple are about to hook up, stuns and paralyzes a man, and, while his partner screams, uses a scalpel to slice him open, dig around inside him, and yank out a chrome liver, leaving him bleeding to death on the floor. Later, Forest Whitaker’s character is wearing a fun apron and grilling at a barbecue when he decides to call up his taxi driver buddy to bring him a victim. He uses a steak knife to slice open the man in the back of the cab while Jude Law’s wife looks at him with mild disapproval as if he’s only committed a party foul. Another repo man stabs at a screaming woman on a crowded subway. Despite these horrifying public butcherings, everyone acts like this is fine. It’s a total failure of worldbuilding, which makes it a total failure of a sci-fi movie.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are both way too good actors to be in this schlock. Forest Whitaker is an Oscar winning icon and the filmmakers must know it since they include a samurai sword in his apartment, referencing Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. While he tries to convince Jude Law to remain his partner rather than moving into the less bloody, less exciting, and less lucrative sales department, a brief expression of self-doubt passes over his face that adds some dimension to his character. But I think this is just the actor trying to elevate the material because the character remains flat and uninteresting for the rest of the movie.

Jude Law also gets one good scene when he does one last repo job before moving into sales. He breaks into the mansion of a music producer he admires, and his victim asks if he can finish the song he’s working on before he has his heart ripped out of his chest. The two have a nice moment finishing the song together and Jude Law conveys how much fun he’s having while subtly showing signs of sadness about what he has to do. When they’re done with the song, he prepares to shock and stop the producer’s heart but instead he’s zapped off his feet and we get a corny freeze frame of Jude Law in mid-air with a goofy look on his face, ruining a good scene with a lame attempt at comedy.

This sets up the predictable plot twist: after failing to convince his buddy to keep murdering people for fun, Forest Whitaker sabotaged the defibrillator in order to damage Jude Law’s heart so badly that he’d need a company heart that he’d need to pay off by continuing to work as a repo man. These men are both irredeemable psychopaths and I hate them.

Now that Jude Law is personally affected, he grows a conscience. He leaves his wife and kid and falls in love with a pretty lady who has dozens of unpaid, artificial organs. He says, “I have an artificial heart and she has an artificial everything else. Maybe we’re two parts of the same puzzle.” This writing is so hokey.

The couple break into the company headquarters to scan their organs and erase their debts. After they Oldboy hallway fight their way into an ultra secure room, we’re suddenly in a Cronenberg movie as they cuddle and kiss while slicing each other up and digging around in each other’s guts. Clearly the filmmakers have seen the same movies I have, they’re just not able to pull off anything they’re attempting.

This is the worst kind of sci-fi: it has an interesting premise and great actors but it’s so poorly conceived, asking us to root for a couple of absolutely monstrous psychopaths, that it leaves you feeling angry, bored, and empty instead of entertained.

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Repo! The Genetic Opera

Where Repo Men has no new ideas, Repo! The Genetic Opera has way too many. It burns through them in the opening and then drops them for a tedious soap opera.

It begins with a comic book prologue: a plague killed millions, survivors depend on an evil company for organs, and missed payments lead to violent, bloody repossession. The company also sells an extremely addictive and expensive drug, so graverobbers sell a blackmarket version that they suck out of corpses’ noses with a syringe that glows bright green like the serum in Re-Animator.

Everything is over-the-top, starting with a sexy goth lady being chased by a sexy goth repo man who chops her up and yanks her guts out. This repo man is played by Anthony Stewart Head, who looks great and sings great. Paul Sorvino plays the head of the company selling these organs, and his opera-trained voice also sounds great. He’s protected by two sexy goth bodyguards who kill people indiscriminately. But then the movie gets bad and stays bad when we meet his three shitty kids: a psychopath, a son who wears other people’s faces stapled onto his own, and a surgery and drug addicted daughter played very badly by Paris Hilton. None of them can act or sing.

The movie drops its organ repossession premise to focus on a boring drama about Anthony Stewarts Head’s wife that he accidentally killed when she was giving birth to their daughter, who grows up to be an angsty and unremarkable teenager that everyone is inexplicably obsessed with. The opera gimmick wears thin fast. Aside from a couple of decent songs by Sarah Brightman and writer Terrance Zdunich (dragged down by Paris Hilton), most of it is clumsy talk-singing.

This wants to be a campy cult classic but, as Susan Sontag wrote, “Pure camp is always naive,” not this lame, try-hard stuff. Nor is it a knowing, bloody, and silly, comedy-musical like The Rocky Horror Picture Show because it lacks that movie’s charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent, as RuPaul would say. This is like the Transmorphers to Transformers or the Atlantic Rim to Pacific Rim; a Hot Topic mockbuster of Rocky Horror.

There can be only one . . . Never Let Me Go.