Fridae

This science fiction allegory has a winning premise: imagine a world in the near future where instead of repossessing your flat or automobile when you can’t keep up the mortgage, the banks decide to take your kidney instead. Now, further imagine that this world looks like the cityscape of Blade Runner with decaying slum districts out of City of Men, while corporations operate like the sociopathic organisations in The Corporation and Capitalism: A Love Story and your health care options are actually worse than what we have in Sicko.

If you need an organ transplant in this world, you have no choice but to fork out more than half a million cool bucks. You can’t afford it? Well, think of your family. Wouldn’t you want to give the best of yourself to them? We’ll make sure you can afford it with our loans, which we’ll structure to fit your earning capacity. And if for some reason you can’t pay, we’ll send in Jude Law and his best pal, Forest Whitaker, to cut you up and get your mechanical organ transplant back. It’s just business, and in a world made up of laws, contracts need to be enforced. Capisce?

The story, if you care to know, is basically Confessions of an Economic Hitman meets Logan’s Run. Jude Law’s macabre repo man gets a change of heart when he gets fitted with a new heart (get the pun?) and turns rogue when he doesn’t have the guts to play the game any more. From then on, it’s Jude Law vs Forest Whitaker and the system!

I said this film has a winning premise. It also has Jude Law and Forest Whitaker. All this would have been perfect if the director were more sure of what the script entailed. It’s gutsy in its social message, and incredibly ballsy when it comes to evoking just about every science fiction movie in the IMDB top 20 list, and then some.

You could imagine how Repo Men could turn out if it were directed by Michael Moore for his biting, over the top satire, or Luc Besson, for how he manages to borrow liberally from genres and films and stitch the stolen parts together nicely. Even without their vision and sensibilities, though, Repo Men is a decent sci-fi film that film geeks should have fun in with identifying its various references.