Repo Men is not for the squeamish! Once again I made the “mistake” of not looking too far into what I was going to see… I figured Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, it’s gonna be good. And, it wasn’t BAD, I just wasn’t prepared for what (post movie) my friend described as Total Recall meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre! The premise centers around a company called The UNION, who manufactures and sells artificial organs for transplant into humans. The twist is that since these body parts are outrageously expensive, if you miss your payments…in come the ‘Repo Men’. Sort of like how they can repo your car, or foreclose on your house, cut your lights…they have a legal right to ‘take” back your ‘past-due’ organs! So, let’s see, squirting, gushing, splattering, leaking and streaming amounts of blood are evident throughout the film, as the repo men use rather both gruesome and unimaginable ways to reclaim organs. My jaw was dropped for a good portion of the film, and/or I frequently had to look away or cover my eyes – that’s one reason I could never work in the medical field. Repo Men is part sci-fi, futuristic, action, thriller if you will. It’s very imaginative and probably skews more toward a male audience! An interesting notion that subtly came across to me, is this whole idea of replacing parts or upgrading what we’re born with…in contrast to the normalcy of plastic surgery today. How far is too far? At what point do we accept what we have naturally without trying to change ourselves…for the better? In the film, it more about vital organs, heart, lungs, liver, etc… But, even at that, would it be right to continually change out organs and contradict our (given) lifespan…hmmm…
