Critics Carve Up Repo Men

Why would anyone dislike a gory movie about guys who repossess artificial organs? Repo Men apparently makes it easy. Only 18 percent percent of its reviews have been positive, according to news aggregator RottenTomatoes.com, as the satire adapted from Eric Garcia’s novel The Repossession Mambo fails to impress critics with its all-star cast of Jude Law, Liev Schreiber, and Forest Whitaker. The premise is a dystopian world 20 years in the future where a company has harnessed the technology to replace any body part, but the replacements are unbelievably expensive, meaning no one can afford them—there’s your health-care parallel. And if people suddenly fall behind in their payments, then the repo men are on hand to knock on their door and take the organs back. “When, after a certain point, Repo Men subsumes its satire to strenuous action sequences,” writes Stephen Holden of the New York Times, “it loses its edge and turns into a chase movie of no special distinction.” Still, the film earned some guarded enthusiasm from Roger Ebert who wrote: “This is the kind of movie that baffles Hollywood, because it isn't made from any known formula and doesn't follow the rules.”