In Miguel Sapochnik’s “Repo Men”, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are Remy and Jake, the titular heavies employed by the megacorporation The Union to repo “forgs” (short for artificial organs).  They must reclaim the devices from those unlucky souls who can’t make the payments for organs that cost more than most houses.  If there were any justice the film would top $200 million on the concept alone.  It could not have been released at a more opportune moment in American history, when the question about the wisdom of abandoning the masses to the predatory bankers, insurance companies and health-care providers is at the forefront of the national discussion as never before.  Liev Schreiber is Frank, the face of the Union, a reptilian middle manager who casually says things like, “We don’t like paid in fulls—we make money off the ones who can’t pay” as if quoting Poor Richard’s Almanac.  The shameless, inhuman quest for profits has rarely been depicted with such stark clarity.

At times this hardboiled action thriller evokes other dark sf futures (mostly Philip K. Dick adaptations: “Blade Runner”, “Total Recall”, “Minority Report”). But it doesn’t have the mindbending twists or wry narrative accents the satirical strains in those movies demand.  The world of “Repo Men” is fuzzy on detail and context.  The fugitives hide in the ruins of the unnamed original city, a toxic warzone-ghetto rotting in the shadow of the gleaming steel fortresses next door.  There is no explanation or hint of how this situation arose.  One shot looks like a pandemic hit the place, reminiscent of “28 Days Later”, but in another the flooded wrecks of a motel hint at a climate change catastrophe.  Perhaps for budgetary reasons, most of the movie takes place indoors, on sets that evoke a time very like our own.  Max lives in a suburb and drives a VW, and his wife works in a mall.  This is also by design, to show that this future is less removed from the present than it first appeared.  It’s recognizably our world, exaggerated only to a frighteningly small degree.  But because the future and present elements seem to exist side by side, without any obvious link, the film doesn't leverage the differences as fully as it could have.

The title is the only link to Alex Cox’s low-fi cult classic “Repo Man”.   Whereas Cox's film jumps with grimy, anarchic bluster, Sapochnik's seems merely unfocused in the way it attempts to combine high-concept satire with a love story. Beth (Alice Braga), on the run from the Union, offers Remy a chance for redemption after he spots her in a nightclub.  More machine, now, than diva, Beth tells Remy about each of her replacement parts: ears, eyes, hip, knee, esophagus, and more.  Sapochnik captures the weird eroticism in the laundry list of artificial parts—of which eroticism more, below—but Beth is otherwise devoid of interest.  She lacks even a threadbare back-story.  Consequently, for most of the movie, her romance with Remy is a lusterless plot contrivance. Sapochnik’s point may be that these people have been deracinated to the point of nullity—bodies are mere meat, hosts for hardware—but if so the audience cannot be asked to care about them.

When it does get around to the satire, “Repo Men” cuts quick and deep.  Remy and Jake are good-natured, off-kilter repo men who bring blue-collar toughness to a precision martial arts style which mirrors their roles as impromptu surgeons. They fight like they operate, efficiently slashing and crippling targets.  Before a “nest” of repo targets they wager on who will score more forgs.  Beth’s ‘surgeon’ puts her under anaesthesia to repair her knee, then steps aside to let the real surgeon take over—her nine year old daughter (“She has steadier hands”).  A nice background touch is the perpetual war the nation is involved in, glimpsed on a TV in Remy’s home.  Troop deployments are discussed on the morning news program in sunny tones normally reserved for celebrity gossip.  Later we find out Remy and Jake served together in a tank unit like a couple of giddy kids living out a video game dream: “It disappeared!”, a jubilant Remy shouts after he wipes out a target with a well-aimed shell.  The demise of one repo man gives new meaning to the notion of the typewriter as weapon.

An interesting theme in “Repo Men” is the breakdown of the division between work and home.  One grisly repo takes place at a backyard barbeque.  “I’m going out for meat”, Jake announces to the guests, after whispering to Remy, the host, that he’s going out to the front of a house for a quick score.  There a taxi driven by an accomplice pulls up and Jake takes out a forg in the back seat with a butcher knife.  The taxi scene is just one instance of how the repo men cannot help but bring work home with them.  Most of the repos take place in the victims' homes; one of Remy’s repos is the forg-heart of T-Bone (RZA), a musician who works at home himself.  There aren’t any chase sequences on city streets or dark alleys.  The action in the no-man’s land outside the metropolis takes place in what used to be apartment buildings.  Where is the workplace, in this world?  What is left of personal space?  The movie records a disorienting overlapping of boundaries between private and public, home and work, flesh and technology, reality and dreams.  The phrase “it’s personal” no longer carries any meaning; to change who we are, Remy says, we must change what we do for a living.

Sapochnik isn't above layering on the gore, however. "Repo Men" is a few films rolled into one, and one of them is a full-throttle action flick. The best adrenaline rush in the film is Remy’s one-on-all battle against his ex-colleagues to get past the Pink Door, the semi-mythical area in the Union's headquarters where forgs are processed.  The fight takes place in a hallway, a space which, thanks to movies like "The Matrix", has become the new arena for combat; the hallway is to modern action movies what the Wild West salloon was to Westerns forty years ago. Part Zach Snyder, part Jackson Pollack, the sequence rollicks with blasts, spurts, sprays, gushes, and mists of blood, together with a fetishistic choice of weapons (a hacksaw makes an appearance, improbably attached to a hacksaw-cam). Sapochnik’s true master isn’t Philip K. Dick but David Cronenberg, maybe with a splash of Sam Raimi.

The mix of the visceral and the intellectual is a jumble until the end, when the movie's sensibilities cohere perfectly. If one can scene can make a movie, “Repo Men” has one.  At the end of their long run from the Union, Remy and Beth make it behind the Pink Door and attempt to exit the Union’s database system by scanning in their forgs as if returning them voluntarily.  Trouble is, the only way to scan the devices is to slice themselves open and jab a sort of supermarket checkout pistol-scanner into each other’s bodies until it finds the forg and the nearby mainframe beeps assent.  Sapochnik treats the audience to a stunning parody of a sex scene: mutual surgery replete with burning kisses, heavy breathing and eyes rolling up into sultry, half-shut eyelids.  It is hilarious, cringeworthy, brilliant, and utterly sick.  Sapochnik evokes the sex-death cocktail of “Crash” even as he stages a wink-wink postmodern crucifixion and shows us the next step in human evolution: the new human is a barcoded commodity. 

Holding the movie's random elements together are two fine lead performances by Jude Law and Forest Whitaker.  Law's performance is gruesomely physical. As Remy falls behind on his payments, his eyes seem to grow bigger and bigger as his body wastes away into a pearly, humid, malarial hardness.  Law also shows off excellent comic instincts, as he did in “AI” and “Closer”. If Law can’t quake with the molten intensity of, say, Christian Bale, he can tap a vein of sarcasm Bale hasn’t got.  Whitaker’s vagabond, park-bench eccentricity gives Jake ominous depths.  The actor uses Jake's elevation of “rules” into a code of honor to evoke his own signature turn in “Ghost Dog”. Not for nothing are there samurai swords on display in Jake’s apartment  (an amusingly ironic update:  'the way of the samurai' co-opted by bankers and APRs.)  Jake and Remy's friendship approaches but narrowly avoids the action-flick cliché of friends-turned-enemies.  Their final resolution turns out to be a fitting one even as it further underscores the movie's unevenness.   The loose ends Sapochnik doesn't tie up are memorable, though, and “Repo Men”, is a gory little gem that posterity will sadly handle, unlike Cox's original, with less kindness than it merits.