First Hit: What started out as a film with promise, it soon dug itself into a very deep and mediocre hole.
Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are good actors however the script and direction let them wallow in a poorly executed idea. This film had possibilities because the idea, artificial body parts being used to save humans, is not that far away.
Think about what it would mean to be able to go into a store and buy a kidney, liver, lung or heart if you needed a new one. Let’s say you’re 35 years old and your kidney is failing. Waiting for a donor is takes a long time. What if you go to a store and buy a new kidney? What would you pay? Would it be worth $50,000, $100,000, $250,000 dollars?
Let’s say you buy one for $100,000 but started missing some payments. Would the company that sold you the kidney have the right to repossess their product?
In this film, they do and Remy (played by Law) and Jake (played by Whitaker) are two of the best at repossessing the product their company sells when clients are past due. They work for Frank (played by Liev Schreiber) a store manager whose job it is to sell product to people who cannot afford it and to allocate the past due notices to his "Repo Men".
Their repossession methods are a bit extreme, but it is all in the contract the clients sign and this is where the company makes money, the repossessed parts are cleaned up and used again. All this backfires on Remy when he becomes a body part recipient.
Law attempts to keep this film alive and attention-grabbing, but the script and overall direction of the film is impossibly lost and becomes complicated in an attempt to be interesting. Whitaker is one of the few people that, even in a poor film, can express so many different and interesting feelings and emotions with his face. In one moment he can seem jovial but there is always a new expression coming and it may be dark. Schreiber is good as the store manager. Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner wrote this very poor screen play while Miguel Sapochnik directed. His lack of a clear and realistic vision made for a lack luster effort.
Overall: This is a waste of good talent. A better developed story with clear direction could have made this a real interesting science fiction thriller.