Review

Review Date: 21-March-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Repo Men (2010)

Are people able to feel concern for others only when they recognize an explicit kinship to them? Hollywood apparently thinks so, and it is starting to get me down. Last year's District 9 and Avatar and this year's Repo Men all have a central character who behaves callously towards a specific population but develops compassion after becoming one of the very beings he was once happy to abuse. The first two films are better written and more engrossing than the third, which is probably why I did not notice the import of this idea until now. It poses a classic science fiction question, I suppose: whether it is human (or will remain human down the road) to care about things that are alien to oneself. Psychologists have likely researched the nature and origin of empathy, but I am afraid to look into their findings lest they agree with the answer these movies provide.

Repo Men takes the concept to the extreme. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker star as average guys of the future whose job is repossessing prosthetic organs from people who have fallen behind in their transplant payments. This entails breaking into the people's homes, shooting them with a tranquilizer gun, slicing open their bodies, ripping out the organ, and leaving them dead or dying on the floor. The government seems not to frown on this activity because the victims signed contracts agreeing to their debt at the time they received the organ. Neither does Law or Whitaker seem conflicted about his career, although Law's wife leaves him because of its gruesomeness.

You know what happens next: one of these guys (Law) is forced to experience the business from the other end of the tranquilizer gun. With a prosthetic heart in his chest and family troubles on his mind, his work ethic and paychecks diminish and he becomes hunted by the vicious pack of which he used to be a member. He does not suffer alone, for he forms a romantic alliance with another fugitive who has a slew of man-made body parts (Alice Braga) while his old pal Whitaker, though uncomprehending, still harbors some brotherly love.

A flashback about the friends' past mentions their small brains, which made them useful tools to both the army and their money-grubbing, soulless employer (Liev Schreiber). This puts forth the theory that only people of limited intelligence, not human beings as a group, are incapable of spontaneous empathy, although I imagine that culture, upbringing, and personality are as much to blame as a low IQ. In any case, the movie itself reveals a degree of dimwittedness as it plows towards its bloody ending. (Hasn't psychology told us that stylized violence in movies increases people's disassociation from others?) As for the erotic scene featuring unusual modes of penetration, I have not decided whether that is inventively kinky or a sick way to link said violence to sex. (Scan my bar code, baby!)

At least there is a silver lining to the bleakness behind these movies. Even if it is true that we care only for things directly connected to ourselves, cinema may create that connection for us. The point of Repo Men, like District 9 and Avatar, is that the characters who discover compassion are better for it, and the movies allow the audience to share their understanding.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.