REPO MEN

Bloody, violent and occasionally comic, this health-care-run-amok sci-fi thriller has a lot going for it, but ultimately falls short of the mark.

Set in future where a massive corporation known as The Union has cornered the market on organ transplantation – providing consumers with just about any body part they might need for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece – the story centers on “repo man” Remy (Jude Law), who quite happily goes around slicing folks open and reclaiming the aforementioned organs should a customer fall behind on payments. He and his partner, Jake (Forest Whitaker), have been doing this work for ages, but an on-the-job accident soon puts Remy in his victims’ position: saddled with an artificial heart he can’t afford, and looking at the business end of an impending repossession that will, of course, leave him dead.

On the run from his former boss (Liev Schreiber), Remy teams with a comely singer (Alice Braga), who’s got more synthetic body parts than she can count and no money to pay for any of them. The fugitive duo race from derelict location to derelict location as they try to figure out a solution to their dire situation while dodging a growing army of Remy’s bloodthirsty former colleagues.

For a while, the film is nicely taut with a great (if not exactly original... hello, Repo! The Genetic Opera) premise and engaging leads. But then, just after the halfway mark, it kind of loses its mind. There is a turning point and a revelation that rings completely false and is, ultimately, unnecessary in terms of the remainder of the film unfolding as it does. There is a nice coda that explains and repairs some of the mess that comes before it but, by then, it feels like too little, too late.

Shot in Toronto, and with little effort made to actually conceal that fact (look! there’s a TTC streetcar!), the action and effects are decent, but not terribly spectacular. There is a lot of gore, so if you’re at all squeamish at the site of blood or, you know, graphic knee surgery, you may want to avert your eyes frequently.

Casting-wise, Law and Whitaker are solid, and Schreiber makes for a good foil but, as is often the case with films like this, Alice Braga isn’t given much more to do than co-star as the token girl in the boy movie. Her character’s relationship with Remy provides the requisite steam, but little more... and I think the blame is divided equally between the lacking screenplay and the actress.

There’s a fantastic little scene involving a nine-year-old “surgeon” (Tiffany Espensen, who got the biggest laugh in the film) but, overall, Repo Men contains plenty of decent elements that the filmmakers haven’t really sewn together into as cohesive and compelling a package as they could have.