Repo Men could have been a really cool cyberpunk type movie, but it wasn't. Think Bladerunner but not as gritty, intelligent, or good. Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker play a pair of repo men that work for an evil corporation that manufactures and distributes artificial human organs. When people fall behind on their payments the repo men come to take the organs back. I don't really understand the business model being used in this movie. The organs cost in the neighborhood of $600,000 and the interest rate on the loan of the organ is 19.95%. The salesman have a variety of payment plans available for a variety of lifestyles should you not be able to afford to buy the organ up front. Throughout the movie organs are repossessed from alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, the homeless, and just about everyone else you wouldn't give a loan or an organ to. Sure the corporation just hunts them down and takes back their organs, but why did they give them out in the first place? It turns out that they do that because if they didn't Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker wouldn't have anything to do and the movie would resemble the Maytag repairman commercials. Anyway, things are going poorly for Jude Law because his wife has problems with her husband going out an effectively murdering people. Law decides to give up the repo business after one last job. Unfortunately for Law he suffers an accident that damages his heart and he has to get an artificial one. After recovering he no longer looks at things the same and can no longer carve people up for a living. As a result Law falls behind on his payments and his heart is ordered to be reclaimed.
The movie doesn't do a very good job establishing why the company can just go out and hack people up, or why nobody seems interested in stopping them when they are. I guess the audience is just supposed to assume the corporation controls everything. With the high body count that Law and Whittaker rack up, just in the first half hour, it's a wonder that anyone is left alive at all, nobody seems to be paying for their organs. The public at large seems to be oblivious to this fact because all it takes is a few soothing words from the sales rep and they all sign on the dotted line. The big problem with Repo Men is that it simply isn't very believable and the movie makes very little effort to make it so.
The movie doesn't do a very good job establishing why the company can just go out and hack people up, or why nobody seems interested in stopping them when they are. I guess the audience is just supposed to assume the corporation controls everything. With the high body count that Law and Whittaker rack up, just in the first half hour, it's a wonder that anyone is left alive at all, nobody seems to be paying for their organs. The public at large seems to be oblivious to this fact because all it takes is a few soothing words from the sales rep and they all sign on the dotted line. The big problem with Repo Men is that it simply isn't very believable and the movie makes very little effort to make it so.