Need To Bum Yourself Out? Revisit Repo Men
As if debt collectors weren’t already bad enough.
Hope? Never heard of it, at least not in the 2010 dystopian sci-fi action movie Repo Men. In its high-tech, near-future world where artificial organs can be “repossessed” by their corporate creators, the whole system is out of order, and the actions of its leads don’t amount to much more than a hill of beans. The real horror is that neither the movie’s world nor the toxic love story at its twisted heart feels all that exaggerated anymore.
Jude Law’s Remy gets the quintessential love interest who must be saved once his life falls apart and he goes on the run, but his true soulmate is clearly his bestie and partner in legalized crime, Jake (Forest Whitaker). The two are the best at what they do: retrieving the artificial organs (aka "artiforgs") their corporate employers lease to desperate customers at exorbitant prices if customers fall behind on payments.
When Remy and Jake show up to collect, there’s generally blood, terror, and the stated legal right to have an ambulance on standby. Not that it matters; people don’t tend to survive having an entire organ violently removed from their bodies. Before Remy is victimized by the system he upholds, Repo Men is practically a mafia movie, as he effortlessly shifts from dropping his young son off at school to murdering people for a living.
Remy’s wife Carol (a wasted Carice van Houten), whose discomfort with her husband’s profession gives her the thankless role of nag, is so appalled enough by what Remy does that she leaves him after he steps out of a family barbecue for a quick repossession job. But the consequences of his actions don’t hit home until Remy’s so-called last job, the repossession of a heart, literally backfires thanks to a faulty defibrillator. When he comes to, he’s horrified to discover that he’s now the very unwilling recipient of his own artificial heart.
The most exaggerated component of Repo Men isn’t the action sequences or the premise that a healthcare company can legally slaughter its customers in broad daylight. It’s that a man like Remy would be unable to develop the cognitive dissonance to continue his work, whether it’s cutting open delinquent consumers or staying behind a sales desk to persuade people to fall into the very trap he’s found himself in. Regardless, he now sees himself too much in the people he’s being paid to hurt, which makes him fall behind on his payments and be forced to go on the run.
Two best buds.
Since the movie wants us to root for Remy, he decides to take in Beth (Alice Braga), another outcast with several artiforgs, including some from the black market. Beth doesn’t get much in the way of development, but she’s the catalyst for a dark descent into the city’s underworld, where we learn how those society deems disposable navigate and escape the moneyed tendrils of a country that values profit above all.
Usually, that means fleeing for less income-obsessed shores, and since Remy still has some privilege to throw around, escaping in relative comfort and safety via the airport almost works. But because he’s decided to care about someone less important, his attempt is thwarted, and his former partner Jake begins closing in. And since providing order in this brutal world still gives him meaning, Jake has the skills, knowledge, and drive to be a formidable foe.
Try not to be shocked, but our dystopian hero ends up on the run.
This is all rather bleak, especially once the movie’s true ending is revealed. Leave now if you fear spoilers, but it turns out Remy hasn’t overcome the odds, Jake didn’t experience a sudden and uncharacteristic change of heart, and the two men haven’t ridden off to a faraway beach as Beth frolics in the distance, with no scars to show from her recent blood-soaked body horror experiences.
No, the triumphs of the last 30 minutes were actually part of another new corporate innovation for brain-damaged people, one that provides a comforting fantasy for them as they live out their bedridden lives. Yet love, in its twisted way, won out, since it’s Jake who’s responsible for paying off Remy’s debt so he can enjoy his newfound simulated peace. And in Repo Men, what’s a greater demonstration of love than agreeing to financially provide for another person in perpetuity?
