Miguel Sapochnik 2010′s Repo Men
Posted by Petra · 3 Comments
I sat here tonight and asked myself what should have been a simple question. The question being: "Which would be worse - Being hunted by the hunter... or being the hunter, who in a split second at no fault of their own, has the rug pulled out from under them and becomes the hunted?"
It's rather odd in that when a person has no personal attachment or experience with what ever it is they are hunting, can do so with eager anticipation and a somewhat perverse enjoyment. But once that separation is broken and a common ground is acknowledged, a rebirth happens within the hunter and the switch is irrevocably flipped.
In Miguel Sapochnik 2010's Repo Men, Jude Law plays Remy, a hunter for "the Union" who repossesses body organs from persons who have become past due in their payments. Usually these repos are callously brutal, bloody, and more often then not, deadly. It's rather simple really. Pay your insanely expensive bill and maintain your new body part. Don't pay your bill, and suffer the gruesome consequence.
Remy repos without guilt, without remorse, methodically, and by the book. His wife doesn't like it so pushes him to switch to a desk job so he can be home more often and not bring the brutality of what he does to their doorstep.
So on one last mission before switching to sales rather than remaining in repos Remy's defib unit goes haywire resulting in his becoming the lucky recipient of the "top of the line" artificial heart offered by The Union. You'd think that since he was one of their top repo men, and since the artificial heart was as a result of faulty equipment provided by The Union, that he would get it free of charge as a sort of "workers comp."
But if you did, you would be guessing wrong.
Now on the run, fighting for the very life he thought he no longer wanted, Remy is teamed with Alice Braga as Beth (the "butterfly" girl in I am Legend) another multiple organ recipient exceptionally past due on her bill, fighting to free themselves from radar, and for the chance to live.
Teamed with an exceptional cast including Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber, Repo Man (if you let it) will make you think about things you never considered. It will make you think about what is important in your life and how with the blink of an eye, you can lose it all, and what lengths you would go to to keep it.
But as much as I enjoyed this movie, the subtle life messages it delivered, and the way it forced me to ponder my own determination to live, I have to confess that the ending fuckin' BLEW! Realistic ending? Sure, for the movie subject matter anyway. But for the enjoyment of the movie experience? Horseshit! Pure and simple and steamy and stinky horseshit. And for that reason along this movie won't make it into my drawer of keepers.....
....but DAMN it was so close!!
I must confess that the explicit and prolonged rape scene of the 1972 version was so disturbing that I questioned whether or not I would be able to sit though the same scene of the 2009 version. I am relieved to say that the remake saw fit to tame down the graphic and multiple rape scenes of the first to just one. But that one scene was so well written and directed that it managed to convey every emotion of horror, disgust, and sadness as was felt in the original. Some reviewers feel this alone is reason enough to consider this an awful movie not worth the time or money. But if these same emotions were not invoked or if they were inadequately delivered, this movie would not have even come close to being as effective as the first.
From the get-go, this movie plays out differently from the first. For starters, you know right away who the bad guys are. And though the chain of events that positions Mary and Paige in the hands of those bad guys is rather predictable, I found myself every bit as captivated in their fear as I did in the original. Moreso actually, as Sarah Paxton was much more believable in the role of Mary than was Sandra Peabody.
Then there is