"Repo Men" takes place in a near-future society run by corporations that repossesses organs from transplant patients who can't pay for them.
The movie plays this premise for macabre laughs and sometimes gets them - there is a decent, tough-guy buddy movie chemistry between Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as the hard-nosed repo men who taser "deadbeat" clients, then do on-the-spot (and exceedingly graphic) reclamation of livers, kidneys, hearts.
Liev Schreiber also has some choice moments as their boss, a slick corporate shill who persuades desperate people to purchase organs they really can't afford.
If internal organs were overpriced homes, this dynamic would almost exactly match our housing and credit meltdown, and Schreiber would work for Goldman Sachs.
So it's hard to completely dislike a movie that has this many cheeky things to say about pay-to-play health care or our Chernobylized economy.
On the other hand, it's hard to completely like a movie that shows two people making out while each sticks a hand deep into the other's chest cavity.
You can see why test audiences would look at that kind of grisly content (there's plenty here) and say, no thanks. As they must have back in 2007 when "Repo Men" was actually filmed. Since then, it's been stuck in some studio limbo between straight-to-video and a quickie release during the month in which Hollywood gets rid of its misfit toys, which, in case you didn't know, is March.
Still, it's probably the movie's gruesomeness, not any kind of outright awfulness, that accounts for its delay in reaching the market.
"Repo Men" has imagination and some darkly comic high points - one occurs at a black market organ shop that takes on the characteristics of an Asian nail salon.
It also has a shriveled heart, which is evident not just in the clinical organ-removal scenes, but in the movie's general attitude toward humanity. Law, for instance, plays a guy in a strained marriage. His unaccountably angry wife gets angrier as the movie goes along, and you wonder why, until you see the writers are simply setting her up for an ugly smackdown.
And though we're led to believe the movie is pro-consumer, that's another head fake. Those who stick around for the perspective-shifting final moments will get another takeaway - that these poor organ recipients are getting the health care they deserve.