Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
(R)
**
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Repo Men is either a sci-fi film that’s “not as smart as it should be or a dumb action movie” that’s more complicated than necessary, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. The thriller from first-time filmmaker Miguel Sapochnik starts with a clever enough concept: In an alternate future, a mega-corporation sells artificial organs—but there’s a gruesome hitch. If clients fail to pay, repossession agents (Jude Law and Forest Whitaker), wielding stun guns and scalpels, extract the organs. By treating body parts as commodities, the film attempts to offer commentary on health care today, said Robert Abele in the Chicago Tribune. But “there’s a key organ missing from the movie itself: a brain.” Sapochnik lacks the savvy to pull off a sci-fi satire and so recycles the ideas of everyone from Monty Python to Philip K. Dick. If only he had treated his over-the-top premise “less seriously,” said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. What could’ve been a “dark, gory vision of a dystopian future, leavened with cracked humor,” instead ends up as a one-note thriller.
