Repo Men 2010

A film with an interesting premise but failed to deliver. The first half (first 1 hour) could have been spent on an engaging world-building, but it didn't work out. The second half spends more time on action, but it's a bit full of shtick - and imitation of Oldboy's corridor fight - leaving me wishing for more.

In Repo Men, Jude Law is Remy, a security personnel employed by big corp The Union to retrieve their tech when their clients are unable to pay their debt on artificial organs. It's a classic cyberpunk premise - big medical technology, security agent, and people just trying to get by - that could have been good if the film focus on those tropes. Instead the first half goes nowhere: there's a glimpse of buddy cop (with Forest Whitaker), a glimpse of family drama, a glimpse of romance, a glimpse of people's reliance on medical tech (world-building), but none of them make a coherent backdrop for our protagonist to take action.

Yet the sluggish one hour gives me nothing to engage with. I don't care with the characters, the forced romance, the drama. Perhaps only slightly with the world. When the second half kicks in, Repo Men shifts their slow paced storytelling to action, and I honestly thought any audience can just watch the first five minutes and skip directly to the second half, especially so since the first minutes of the second half connects to the intro. Despite focusing more on gunplay and action sequences, in this second half Repo Men leaves much to be desired. It's no Die Hard nor Has Fallen, sure, but there is almost no tense - not in the sense of Minority Report or The mechanic even - and the action consists of blood and nothing else.

Perhaps being gory is the only significant quality the film has to offer, as it goes to details when people slice up bodies and take (or implant) artificial organs within.

The ending however takes a classic cyberpunk twist, and I suppose it is the only redeeming quality of the film. It's a shame though. I wished the film was more coherent.