Ed's Review Dot Com

Universal Pictures, Relativity Media

Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga, Liev Schreiber

I was really disappointed in this movie.  I expected a lot because it was an interesting premise, but it was never developed properly.  The actors actually did a very good job with a script that just never came together.

Actually Wile Coyote did a better job of convincing me that ACME is an evil corporation that sells defective products.  In this one Union is a company that sells body parts.  No, not human body part, but mechanical ones.  But there’s no betterment of humanity here.  They’re so expensive that no one can afford it, but what if you have to have a heart or a liver to survive?  How much would you pay then?

So people find out they are dying and they sign the contract and their life is right again.  But 3 months of no payments and the Repo Men come to take the parts back, mostly leaving the patient dead.   Now why a company would want to take back a junk worn out used heart instead of refinancing or something is beyond me, but their business is not in hearts and lungs and kidneys, but in Financing and repossessing.

Now Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) are school boy chums who grew up to be the greatest of the Repo Men.  Their checkered past gives them the guts to do the killing for the company.  However Remy’s wife doesn’t like it and wants her husband to get out of the racket.

Now here’s where they got cheap.  Logan’s Run, a great film about a cop, rebelling against the system, is copied heavily, but not near as well.  Additionally it’s dozens of other movies too.  Granted there isn’t anything really original anymore, and I can deal with that if it’s a solid movie, but I think the message of the greedy corporations screwing over the public got in the way of developing the story.   They do a horrible twist in the movie that negates half of it.   It wasn’t needed or realistic, but it did help to advance the agenda of the evil corporation.

Also, it’s unnecessarily gory.  The unrated version adds a lot of extra closeup of cutting and removing body parts so it’s even worse, but in the rated version, it’s still unnecessarily gory.  I’m not sure why they felt that they had to do it this way.  Maybe they were trying to make it edgier, but it’s not really needed.  I found the fight scenes weak, and not really much to advancing the plot.  The partnership between the two buddies never works either.  They never convince us that they even like each other.

Then the final blow is when the “Special Features” screen came up at the end of the movie.  “Wow, not many extra items, but there is a bunch of deleted scenes, and some making of featurettes, and a commentary that might help understand why the movie is done the way it is.

But lo an behold when you click on anything and annoying black screen comes up with a message that says,  “This is a rental copy of the film and only includes the feature film.  If you’d like to see the special features, buy a copy of the DVD or BlueRay.”

I can understand if they didn’t have a “Special Features” menu on the DVD, but to list the items and then try to sell you a copy was a cheap thing to do, and I don’t understand their reasons for playing tricks on their rental customers.   I’m going to keep an eye on Universal films and see if this is something they are commonly doing.  I didn’t like that idea one bit.

So, not a horrible movie.  The acting is pretty decent, but the story is weak, it’s derivative, and the action is not very good, so I think I would recommend leaving this one alone.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog