Repo Men (review)

Repo Men is a film with an identity crisis: part sf-action thriller, part satiric comedy and part splatterpunk gore, it is an uneven viewing experience, with its satire on the profligacy and illogic of consumerist culture often overwhelmed by its intense delight in spectacles of violence. Set in a future in which artiforgs (artificial organs) are routinely sold to clients through credit-card-rate finance packages, the film literalises the rapacious violence of the twenty-first century American economy, evoking both the mortgage crisis and the histrionic debate about healthcare reform and so-called 'death panels'. Should a client be unable to maintain the payments on his new kidney, liver or heart, a repossession man, such as protagonist Remy (Jude Law) or his partner Jake (Forest Whitaker), will turn up to reclaim company property on the spot. Capturing the absurdities of late capitalism, the repossession scenes move instantaneously from staid completion of paperwork to violent assault as organs are savagely cut from the merely stunned defaulters' bodies. And herein lies both the strength and the weakness of this bipolar film: it is on the right topic for effective satire but too often succumbs to the pleasures of spectacle, losing track of their context.

Remy and Jake work for The Union, whose slogan is 'helping you get more you out of you'. The plot concerns Remy's crisis of conscience after an accident makes him the recipient of an artificial heart and hence a potential defaulter himself. No longer able to slice into people with abandon, or to take refuge in the 'a job's a job' mantra he previously shared with Jake, he soon finds himself the target of his former colleagues. The film opens with Remy - after he has gone on the run with Beth (Alice Braga), a woman with several unpaid-for artificial organs - composing a memoir of his experiences (entitled, like co-screenwriter Eric Garcia's 2009 novel upon which the film is based, The Repossession Mambo). It then cuts back in time to when Remy was at the height of his career, and throughout the film the later, more experienced Remy's voiceover comments upon the action. The narrative is largely a long chase sequence in which we first see Remy and Jake bonding over their pursuit of defaulters, enacting a violence that reminds them of their glory days in the army operating tanks in what appears to be Iraq: as Remy explains, the war did not so much end for them as 'change context'. Later, his martial skills prove useful in evading capture, and much of the film's energy is expended in meticulously constructed fight sequences, culminating in an homage to - or parody of - the famed corridor fight sequence in Oldeuboi (Oldboy; Park South Korea 2003).

Unable to escape to non-Union space, Remy decides to attack the system at its core by wiping out all records of debt, thus saving everyone from their subjugation. He appears to accomplish this during an extended and oddly eroticised sequence in which he and Beth erase their files by repossessing themselves, that is, by penetrating one another's bodies with the scanning wand to record the (bogus) return of the artiforgs still functioning inside them. In the final five minutes of the film, however, we learn that the preceding thirty have been Remy's elaborate fantasy, made possible by the M5 Neural Net artiforg installed after he lost - rather than won, as previously shown - a battle with Jake.

Repo Men has been widely derided as sensationalist and derivative. Both criticisms are fair. Although the film clearly gestures towards saying something about the consequences of unconstrained capital and of a biopolitical order in which human bodies become merely commodities, its embrace of horror film aesthetics and action film fervour means the social commentary is often lost in the jouissance of excess. Furthermore, it is often flooded by echoes of other films: a premise shared, unacknowledged, with the cult film Repo! The Genetic Opera (Bousman US 2008); resonances between Law's performance...