Repo Men

I had a good time watching Repo Men, and sections of the movie were simply awesome. The sexual surgery scene, for example, was sufficiently kinky that Cronenberg would have been proud to have shot it. Despite the good stuff, though, the movie ended up being another empty-calorie snack that was occasionally tasty and good enough to spike the blood sugar for a bit, but not delicious enough to make you count it a memorable mental meal.

Okay, I pushed that food analogy way too far. No more of that.

The central flaw of Repo Men is a failure to commit. One minute, it wants to be a character study. The next, it's a sweeping social commentary (with a very vague and very easy bad-guy company). A few seconds later, it's a gory action fest. While it's certainly possible for a movie to be all of these things and a complete success, Repo Men instead alternated among them and never managed to pull them all together into a coherent whole.

The foreshadowing of the ending was also so obvious that anyone who regularly reads science fiction will see the footage and instantly know how the movie will end.

Despite my misgivings, though, I have to recommend you see this film for at least the following three reasons:

* the sexual surgery scene I mentioned
* Forest Whitaker's performance
* the fight scene in which Jude Law takes off his coat and pulls out his knives

Just expect to come away craving a truly complete film sometime in the next few hours.