DVD Review - Repo Men

The Jude Law and Forest Whitaker action gore-fest Repo Men comes to DVD this week. And, while the movie hardly turned heads in theaters, find out if it should end up in your collection.

Creative Loafing sent The Rabid One out to see the movie awhile back, and he had some interesting things to say in his review about how the characters were truly lacking, and the gore was trying to make up for it. As I generally agree with the Rabid One, this is no exception. With a hero, you have to give the audience a reason to root for him, and director Miguel Sapochnik and star Jude Law simply didn’t do that. As a result, the action, and impending doom, and gallons upon gallons of blood shed simply don’t have the impact they should have. Forrest Whitaker was great in the movie, sure, and Liev Schrieber is always decent, and the action was well done, if a bit over the top, but in the end, the movie was simply ok, and the ending, left me unfulfilled.

The Special Features on the disc, although feeling extremely rushed, were enjoyable. They had “The Union Commercials” which were commercials the company in the movie used to talk suckers into buying their organs. I thought there were really good, and often parodied commercials we would see on TV.

There was also a look into the special effects, which was kind of funny, in that the director kept asking the writer to “ask him a question” about the scene, instead of explaining what is going on, but when he did explain it, you could feel the sense of pride he had in his film.

There were also a few deleted scenes, which felt like they were thrown in there, because they would show you a scene from the movie, and somewhere there would be a small snippet of film that wasn’t in the film, with no explanation as to why. Finally, there was directors commentary, which again was a bit awkward listening to the director and the writer talk back and fourth, and there wasn’t much insight, but the few snippets there were quite entertaining.

Overall, if the gory action sounds like your thing, give it a rent, or maybe look for it on HBO, but since there weren’t many special features, and the movie was only ok, I would say pass on this one.