My Review: Repo Men (5/10)

¨At the end, a job is not just a job, it's who you are, and if you wanna change who you are, you have to change what you do.¨

Repo Men has an interesting cast and an original premise, but the movie ends up being far from original. It begins with a lot of promise and some interesting characters, but halfway through the movie it begins to lose itself. The twist at the end didn't work for me and I suspected something like that coming. I didn't like how Jude Law's character changed all of a sudden after the heart transplant. It just didn't make sense how someone like him who had been doing his job for years without regrets would all of a sudden stop in the moment he most needed to continue. Everything seems to develop for the screenplay instead of developing the story. This is Miguel Sapochnick's first feature film and he really wasn't able to use the talented cast or the material to its fullest potential. The movie was based on Eric Garcia's novel The Repossession Mambo, and he also worked on the screenplay with Garrett Lerner who wrote several episodes of House MD and Boston Public. I expected more from this movie considering I enjoyed Garcia's book Matchstick Men, which was also turned into a movie directed by Ridley Scott and featuring Nicolas Cage. In Repo Men however, the screenplay is probably the weakest part of the film, which had to use several gory scenes in order to shock us because the characters weren't developed at all. I really didn't expect this movie to be so gory and violent, but it does have some entertaining action scenes.

The story takes place sometime in the future although the date is never given. Remy (Jude Law) works for a company called The Union that specializes in selling artificial organs. These organs can be bought through credit and just as when you buy a car or a house and can't make the payment those things are taken away from you, so are your organs. This is where Remy comes in, once payments can't be made after a three month grace period he removes these transplants instantly. He is one of the best in the business at retrieving these artificial organs along with his friend from the fourth grade with whom he even went to War with: Jake (Forest Whitaker). They are called the Repo Men because they repossess what belongs to the Union when the high costs can't be paid. Their boss is Frank (Liev Schreiber),a heartless man who only cares about getting what belongs to him back and selling more organs. Jack and Remy also do what they have to without having second thoughts about it because a job is a job. Carol (Carice van Houten) doesn't like what her husband Remy does for a living and constantly asks him to stop being a repo man and work in sales so he can spend more time at home with her and their son Peter (Chandler Canterbury). Remy suffers an accident while doing his job and has to go through a heart transplant himself. Once he recovers he literally has a change of heart since he doesn't feel right about being a repo man because he begins to identify with them now. Since he can't do his job, he can't pay for his heart either and has to hide from the repo men who are after him. He hides along with another organ refugee named Beth (Alicia Braga) and together they try to fight off these men and clean their credit history.

The movie looked promising at first with some good action scenes, but halfway through the movie I began to lose interest. It was hard for me to believe that Remy would have a change of heart just like that and the transformation he went through was not believable considering how cold hearted he was. The cast was pretty strong and they all gave good performances; it was just the story that didn't work. There was an interesting scene near the end that will remind everyone who saw Oldboy of the famous hallway hammer fighting scene. The difference is that this shot was filmed with various different camera angles and edited, while the one in Oldboy was made all in one shot without editing. This scene didn't work as well because all the editing took away the realistic feeling that the Oldboy scene gave. Some other moments of this sci-fi film remind us of Minority Report, but the problem with Repo Men is that we are constantly reminded of these other movies which were far more superior than this one. At the end Repo Men falls short and only is mildly entertaining.

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My Review: Predators (6/10)

¨They can hear you. Smell you. They see you.¨

One of the reasons Predators stands out from it`s predecessors is because Robert Rodriguez was behind this project. His studio, Troublemaker Films, produced this movie in order for him to have controlling rights over it. His first decision was to sign Nimrod Antal as the director. Antal had directed Vacancy, Armored, and the movie that opened the doors for him in Hollywood: Hungarian film Control. Armored was a huge disapointment for me last year and a movie I really disliked, but Predators was an improvement considering I went into it with very low expectations. Predators is much better than the AVP sequels or even the second predator film and it does the original 1987 movie justice. Of course it is not as good as the original movie because, well that one was original and we had never seen the predators before, but now we have been bombarded with them in four other movies and finally in this sequel the suspense is back and so is the fear of the unseen. The movie builds off very nicely from the begginning introducing each character and setting the mood of the film. The location chosen for filming was excellent and contributed to set the atmosphere. The screenplay for this movie was written by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, but it was one of the weakest things about this movie which was full of cheesy dialogs and copied phrases from the original.

The movie begins with Royce (Adrien Brody) falling from the sky into a jungle. His parachute opens up just in time, but he can`t quite remember how he got to this place. He runs into another man who seems to have got there in the same conditions, Cuchillo (Danny Trejo), a member of a Mexican drug cartel. All of a sudden they begin to be shot at by a Russian Sptesnaz soldier named Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov), but Royce evades him and ends up pointing a gun at his face and letting him know that they are not the enemy. The three men run into an Israeli sniper named Isabelle (Alice Braga) who claims she has never been in a jungle like this one. They have all been parachuted from the sky and the last thing they remember is seeing a white light and then waking falling in the air into this mysterious place. Isabelle claims to have seen more parachutes fall near her so they continue to search for answers and run into two men fighting: Mombasa (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a revolutionary african fighter, and Stans (Walton Goggins), an inmate who was going to be sentenced to death in two days and a former FBI most wanted criminal. The six run into a Predator camp where they find all sort of dead body`s which are kept as trophies and here they run into Hanzo (Louis Ozawa Changchien) a Yakuza enforcer, and Edwin (Topher Grace), a doctor and the only one who doesn`t seem to fit the profile of the group. They soon discover that they`re not on their planet and that they have been brought here as game for hunters.

The major difference this film has with the original is that no Arnold Schwarzenegger look a like is cast. Instead, Oscar award winner Adrien Brody was chosen for the lead and he did a pretty good job. Alicia Braga is also good in this film and is perhaps the most likeable character. She makes a reference to the 87 movie mentioning how an elite military group was killed in the jungles of Guatemala by a creature similar to this. My favorite character however was the quiet and reserved Hanzo. The first half of this movie was excellent and did a great job of creating suspense, but the last half really let me down once Laurence Fishburne`s character came into play. I really thought that his appearance was going to improve the movie, but the screenwriters really messed up from this point on. Once the predators are no longer hidden the movie losses that mystery, although the action is pretty entertaining. The major problem I found with the second part of the movie however was that several of the characters changed personalities from one moment to the next only to give the film a more dramatic effect. The first part of the film is worth 4 stars, while the second only 2 out of 5. Predators is a far better sequel than the other movies and can be enjoyed if taken lightly.