2010 wasn’t the best of years for mainstream. of course, not many years are particularly strong for mainstream film making, but 2010 was a year that was especially poor. But while most of the films all that weren’t, 2010 marked a bit of a revival of genre film making with films like Shutter Island, Kick Ass and Inception gaining traction in mainstream.
Of course, just a few short years later genre films and television shows are seemingly the greatest things since sliced bread so for a genre nerd like myself I find myself a bit out of sorts that the very things that I’ve loved since a kid are now being enjoyed by everyone and their mother. But before the mainstream was infatuated with genre film making their was 2010, a year that had its fair share of genre failures, one of which was Repo Men.
Repo Men is a rough facsimile of an already terrible movie, that being Repo! The Genetic Opera, though at least Repo Men at least has the decency to spare you from the horror of actors singing terrible songs impressively poorly. Of Course, Repo Men was trapped in development hell, as it was actually based on a book that was started in 2003, but wasn’t published until 2009, though the film that was based on the book was actually shot in 2007. Got all that? Is it really any wonder that the movie ended up being more than a bit of a mess?
The film drags like you wouldn’t believe as the characters are uninteresting and the tension in the film is practically non-existent. Then you have the antagonists, which are flat and frankly, boring. On top of that, the film tries to interlock this over-reaching social commentary that really is utterly pointless, even more so when the film drops an eye rolling ending that reduces the film’s finale to non-existence.
But while you must wallow through shallow mediocrity for 90 minutes you quickly discover that all of that was to set you up for a final reel that is trumps any realm of absurdity you could possibly imagine. From a violent recreation of the Oldboy hallway hammer fight, a race through a white dreamscape and finally culminates in a violent erotic explosion that is a Great Moment in Cinema History and has to be seen to be believed.
Which you are about to.
