MOVIE REVIEWS: “REPO MEN”

The plot of Repo Men revolves around a couple living in the future who can’t afford the payments on transplanted synthetic organs in their bodies and are evading hired hands who track down such slackers, rip open their bodies, and repossess the organs. The movie has started a whole new health-care debate among the critics. “It’s almost like Repo Men accidentally had its brain removed,” scoffs Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. Several critics can’t figure out whether the movie was intended to be a satire or a serious sci-fi thriller. Stephen Holden in the New York Times says it starts out as a recession-era satire but then “subsumes its satire to strenuous action sequences” and in the process “loses its edge and turns into a chase movie of no special distinction.” Except that it may be Universal’s latest flop. “The real puzzle is how a major studio could put its name on such a heartless piece of hack work,” writes Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. Several critics have suggested that another puzzle is how Forest Whitaker, Jude Law, and Liev Schreiber could have agreed to sign on to appear in it.