Repo Men

Repo Men Directed by Miguel Sapochnik Runtime: 111 min.

There are plenty reasons to loath Repo Men—starting with its title appropriated from Alex Cox’s great Los Angeles oddball/working-class comedy Repo Man, the best American movie of 1984. This frustrating new film also exhibits bald steals from graphic-novel movies, Park Chan-Wook kill fests, Minority Report chase scenes and Tarantino snark. The story of literal body-snatchers (Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as bounty hunters who take-back the transplants that patients have not finished paying for) always matches scenes of extreme, ugly violence with inappropriate, smart-ass background music (such as Nina Simone's "Feeling Good").

But just before it’s over, Repo Man goes so far into bad taste that director Miguel Sapochnik finally seems to get his hipster/surrealist rhythm. The images become brighter and faster and Sapochnik does something stupefying: A sci-fi liebestod between Jude Law and Alice Braga that is outrageously sexual and literally clinical. It’s a bizarre payoff for suffering the familiar plot where Law gets caught up in the same scheme he’s been serving and now must save his own life (and Braga’s) by sacrificing themselves to dismantle the body-parts repossession system.

Repo Men had so far suggested that none of the traditional values matter. The Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner screenplay doesn’t clearly allegorize the current crisis of unaffordable health care; it just adds gunfire and ninja-battles to the concept of Dirty Pretty Things. But the love/death scene seems to acknowledge this as Law and Braga embrace, fondle, tongue and gasp while digging inside each other’s bodies for the barcode organs they must scan into a computer. This scene resembles the 2000 music video Rock DJ directed by Vaughan Arnell, where British popstar Robbie Williams does a striptease and, desperate to get the attention of an aloof disco DJ, Williams removes his clothes, then his skin, then chunks of flesh and handful of guts—down to his skeleton, while singing: "When’s it gonna stop?"

Sapochnik doesn’t have that kind of grisly wit. His strip scene is remarkable because it’s also clearly meant to be romantic and sincere. Body-consciousness this Fincher-goofy looks especially unfortunate in light of Josef Von Sternberg’s 1928 silent masterpiece Docks of New York showing one day only, [Monday, March 29 at Film Forum]. Sternberg’s body-consciousness was the key to his supreme spiritual insight. No other filmmaker better understood the significance of the human vessel; Von Sternberg dramatized the tension between mental and physical needs. Dockworker George Bancroft and suicidal streetwalker Betty Compson embody Sternberg’s perception of physical attraction. Bancroft seduction—by showing off his sexual history tattooed on a hairy, vascular arm—is more outrageous than Repo Men’s jokey autopsy. Von Sternberg surface images penetrate his characters’ carnality. Their spiritual ambition is the only respite in this unrelieved purgatory.

Von Sternberg relied on exquisite lighting (by Harold Rosson), not F/X to achieve this film’s supernal atmosphere. Like all Sternberg, this is a pinnacle of cinema—going so far past mere mimesis (photographing the natural world) that Docks of New York like his magnificent debut The Salvation Hunters achieves the immediate, deep expressiveness of semi-religious Renaissance painting. Great stuff, not to be missed.