text: What do you call a movie about a giant medical conglomerate that sells human organs on the installment plan — and, if the patients don’t pay, sends a repo man to collect, literally, the company’s pound of flesh? 
   
   Well, back in 2008, you called it “Repo! The Genetic Opera.” And if you were smart you avoided it. 
   
   Now, in 2010, you call it “Repo Men.” 
   
   And if you’re very smart, you still avoid it. 
   
   
   
   Repo Men 
   
   (R) Universal (111 min.) 
   
   Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. With Jude Law, Forest Whitaker. Now playing in New Jersey. 
   
   Stephen Whitty's rating: One star 
   
   Ratings note: The film contains graphic gore, violence and nudity. 
   
   The new, strangely familiar (yet supposedly original) film doesn’t share much more with the older cult horror. For one thing, it doesn’t have any opera. For another, it doesn’t star Paris Hilton. 
   
   So, it’s got that going for it. 
   
   But it’s just as ugly and revolting as the other movie and just as clueless. The first picture thought it was an outrageous satire. This one thinks it’s sardonic adult sci-fi. They’re both wrong. And they’re both awful. 
   
   There’s not much to the story beyond the basic situation. Remy and Jake are a couple of strong-arm guys who drive around some slightly futuristic landscape, hunting down medical deadbeats. And when they find one, out come their scalpels. 
   
   Until the people really are deadbeats. 
   
   Unless you’ve already fallen asleep — which is probably the best way to get through “Repo Men” — you know what’s coming next: Remy is going to have his own, um, change of heart and reconsider his life’s work. And company man Jake is going to go after him. 
   
   Great. Can we go home now? 
   
   If only. Because at this point we have more than an hour of tedious torture to come, including three separate scenes of an artificial kneecap being removed, endless stabbings and so many sprays of arterial blood that the sets soon look like Jackson Pollock paintings. 
   
   As Remy, Jude Law looks as if he has ringworm and is trying very hard to remember when he made movies like “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” As Jake, Forest Whitaker amiably confirms that, no, there is absolutely nothing he will not do. 
   
   There are a few moments of pleasure, thanks to Liev Schreiber as the repo men’s boss. Schreiber, clearly, knows this is offal; he also knows that, if he wants to support his family, even hit Broadway plays sometimes aren’t enough. 
   
   But he’s a pro, so even as he earns his paycheck, he does so with some style and wit. 
   
   Those are certainly rare commodities in this movie, which sacrifices subtlety for the obvious, and originality for the tried-and-true — or, more often, the tried-and-trite. And a last-minute, pull-the-rug-out ending, far from being significant, is only the last in a long line of copouts. 
   
   Full of over-the-top violence and misogynist caricatures (including a nagging wife so horrendous even her own son Tasers her), it’s a film to be endured more than experienced. It succeeds on one level though, even in spite of itself: It makes at least one clear-cut case for repossession. 
   
   Taking back the union cards of everyone involved. 
   
   
   
   
   
   ||||| Repo Men 
   
   March 17, 2010 
   
   Cast & Credits Remy Jude Law 
   
   Jake Forest Whitaker 
   
   Frank Liev Schreiber 
   
   Beth Alice Braga 
   
   Carol Carice van Houten 
   
   Peter Chandler Canterbury 
   
   Ray Joe Pingue 
   
   
   
   Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Written by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, based on Garcia's novel The Repossession Mambo. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for strong bloody violence, grisly images, language and some sexuality/nudity). 
   
   
   
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   "Repo Men" makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care. In a world of the near future, where they still drive current cars, a giant corporation named the Union will provide you with a human heart, kidney, liver or other organ. Let's say a pancreas costs you, oh, say $312,000. No, it's not covered by insurance, but the sales guy says, "You owe it to yourself and your family." For a guy in need of a pancreas, this is an eloquent argument. Interest rates are around 19 percent. 
   
   Now let's say you can't make the payments. If you fall behind more than three months, they send around a Repo Man who shoots you with a stun gun, slices open your body, reaches in and repossesses the organ. To be sure, he puts on latex gloves first. I don't believe the gun kills you, but after they leave you on the floor with an organ missing, your prognosis is poor. 
   
   
   
   Let's say you were conscious during such a procedure. Would it hurt? You bet. At one point in the film, our heroes Remy and Beth (Jude Law and Alice Braga) decide the only way to outwit the company's computer is to repossess themselves. He has a donor heart, and as for Beth, her heart is her own, but is surrounded by guest organs. They don't actually carve themselves open and remove the organs. No, that would be fatal. But they have to reach inside each other with a bar-code scanner and scan them in. As Remy carves into his chest with a big old knife, you oughta see the way his fist clenches and how he grits his teeth. He's thinking, I wish I had the public option. 
   
   
   
   I don't know if the makers of this film intended it as a comedy. A preview audience regarded it with polite silence, and left the theater in an orderly fashion. There are chases and shootouts, of course, and a standard overwrought thriller soundtrack, with the percussion guy hammering on cymbals and a big bass drum. Even then, you wonder. 
   
   
   
   Remy and Beth find themselves locked in a corridor with a dozen guys from the evil corporation, who are well armed. They dodge the bullets and wham some guys with karate, and then Remy pauses, strips off his shirt, reveals his bare (pre-repo) chest and is wearing kinky leather pants with buckles. From scabbards in the back, he withdraws two long knives that help explain why he wasn't seated earlier in the scene. He slices some other guys. Then he shouts "hacksaw!" to Beth, and she slides it to him on the floor, and he whirls around and decapitates three guys, it looked like, although it happened real fast. 
   
   
   
   What are people supposed to think? Is this an action scene, or satire? Does it make any difference? I dunno. I know the actors play everything with deep, earnest seriousness. The head of the Union corporation is Frank (Liev Schreiber), who demands complete dedication from his repo men and is humorously not humorous. Maybe he's not the head of the whole Union, but only their immediate boss. The Union's headquarters building is maybe 100 stories high, and Remy stumbles into a room with guys in white suits working at tables that stretch farther than a football field. 
   
   
   
   There are enough props in this movie to clean out the Organ Department at Moo & Oink's. When I say they're up to their elbows in blood, I mean it. This work takes its toll. Remy's friend at work is a repo man named Jake, played by Forest Whitaker. Like most Forest Whitaker characters and Whitaker himself, he is a warm, nice man. I noticed for the second time in a week (after "Our Family Wedding") that Whitaker has lost a lot of weight and looks great. I hope the extra pounds weren't repo'ed. ||||| Film Reviews 
   
   Repo Men -- Film Review 
   
   "Repo Men" 
   
   Bottom Line: Let the 2010 Razzies race begin! 
   
   The future looks awfully predictable (underscore "awfully") in "Repo Men," a blood-soaked, derivative and increasingly ridiculous sci-fi thriller in which Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play a pair of hotshot repossession agents who forcefully remove artificial organs from those who fall behind on their payments.Comprising reclaimed bits from "Blade Runner," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Children of Men" and glibly served up with hyper Guy Ritchie attitude by first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, the resulting in-your-face mess never knows what it wants to be when it grows up.Those identity issues are destined to take their toll when it comes to tracking down an audience this weekend.When you think clinically violent, muscular, futuristic action vehicles, the nominally thoughtful likes of Law, Whitaker and Liev Schreiber don't readily spring to mind, and that should pose a problem where a targeted young-male demo is concerned.Based on the cautionary tale "Repossession Mambo" by Eric Garcia ("Matchstick Men") and set in a near future where society's quest for eternal youth has come with a price, "Repo Men" revolves around the daily activities of Law's Remy and Forest's Jake on behalf of their employer, an unscrupulous medical technology firm known as the Union.Their job description requires them to track down those in serious arrears and methodically extract those various, leased-to-own synthetic body parts and report back to the head office and their callous, soft-spoken boss (Schreiber).But when an ill-fated repo assignment results in Remy being outfitted with a top-of-the-line Jarvik ticker, he undergoes a, uh, change of heart, and, falling behind in his own payments, finds himself being chased down by his former partner.The film's smug twists and turns might have been more entertaining if one hadn't been able to see any of them coming, but the script, penned by Garcia and Garrett Lerner ("House M.D.") and especially Sapochnik's unsubtle direction signals everything a century in advance.Meanwhile, in front of the cameras, though Law seems to be having fun transformed into a mean, buff fighting machine, one just can't buy him as a kick-ass, Jason Statham-style tough guy when the contrived plotting demands it.Although Whitaker and Schreiber are only slightly less unconvincing, others, including Brazil's Alice Braga ("City of God") and the Netherlands' Carice van Houten ("Black Book"), appear uncomfortable in their English-speaking roles.Shot extensively in Toronto, the film gets decent futuristic value for its production-design buck, courtesy of David Sandefur ("Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D") and visual effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub ("Remember Me"). ||||| Focus Features Ben Stiller as the title character in 'Greenberg.' 
   
   One of the most touching lines in Noah Baumbach's remarkable "Greenberg" is an announcement by the wistful young heroine, Florence Marr: "I've gotta stop doing things just because they feel good." 
   
   Good? There's no evidence that Florence—a portrait of heartbreaking delicacy by Greta Gerwig—feels truly good about anything. She feels bad about herself, and properly anxious about an emerging love affair with Roger Greenberg, a middle-aging misanthrope played with intransigent brilliance by Ben Stiller. Everything's relative, of course. Florence is joyous compared to Roger, a former musician whose anger at the world is matched only by his narcissism. Yet the wonder of the film is how good it makes us feel. "Greenberg" scintillates with intelligence, razor's-edge humor and austere empathy for its struggling lovers. 
   
   Watch a clip from the movie "Greenberg," starring Ben Stiller, Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rhys Ifans; directed by Noah Baumbach, of "The Squid and the Whale." Video courtesy of Focus Features. 
   
   This is a new departure for Mr. Baumbach, even though he might seem to be working the same territory of neurotic dysfunction and mutual need that he explored, sometimes relentlessly, in "The Squid and the Whale" and "Margot at the Wedding." What's new is the combination of warmth and reserve. The film is extremely entertaining—a real romance, however tortured it may be—yet tough-minded and confidently self-contained. 
   
   The setting is Los Angeles, whose physical and spiritual sprawl has been rendered with eerie accuracy. Fittingly, the first extended sequence takes place in a car, with Florence behind the wheel and the camera fixed on her pretty face. (Harris Savides did the fine cinematography.) "You gonna let me in?" she asks nervously. She's alone, running errands, so the question is clearly directed at another driver in another lane. But it's also the anthem of her needy psyche and her lonely life. She works as a personal assistant to Phillip Greenberg (Chris Messina), who lives with his wife and kids in the Hollywood Hills. When the family goes off on vacation to Vietnam, Florence stays behind to take care of their German shepherd, Mahler, and to provide whatever support may be needed for Phillip's brother, Roger, newly arrived from New York via a mental institution that was treating him for depression. 
   
   Of the ménage à trois that forms in the family's absence, Mahler proves to be the most stable member, and even he comes down with an autoimmune disease that lands him at the vet's. "Greenberg" is a love story, yes, but it's also a tale of two people adrift in separate currents, constantly sinking and bobbing to the surface like synchro swimmers out of sync. Florence's judgment is dreadful when it comes to men in general, and potentially disastrous when it comes to this one. She can't understand why Roger lets her into his life, then brutally ejects her, not just once but repeatedly. "You like me a lot more than you think you do," she tells him after one rebuff. Although she's right, Florence is a slow learner who takes a long time to recall a cautionary phrase—"hurt people hurt people"—that she picked up along her painful way. 
   
   Ms. Gerwig's performance is extraordinary—notably nuanced, commandingly tender. But the movie's title is "Greenberg," not "Marr," and Mr. Stiller commands a kind of awe in his refusal to clothe the naked hostility of a character who suffers from the autoimmune disease of self-loathing. ("Life is wasted on people," the hero says at one point.) An ardent arsonist, he has burned most of the bridges that once connected him to friends and a flourishing career. Much of the time Roger looks either haunted or absent, not a black hole but a gray one. 
   
   Focus Features Greta Gerwig plays Greenberg's love interest. 
   
   Rhys Ifans plays Ivan, a former band mate whom Roger seeks out after arriving in L.A. Ivan comes on quietly, a sweet-spirited seeker who has found his way after losing it, but he finally gets his own turn at eloquent anger and Mr. Ifans rises powerfully to the occasion. Mr. Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh (she collaborated with him on the story and served as producer) is attractive and understated as Beth, Roger's old flame. 
   
   A movie with an off-putting hero represents a huge risk. Messrs. Baumbach and Stiller made a bet that we would stay with Roger, and the film, until things took a turn for the better. The bet pays off beautifully—not because the hero is revealed to be nice, but because he reveals himself to be human in a series of startling rages and astonishing monologues that lead to a pleasing climax (and an inspired shot of a giant red balloon-man, arms and legs flapping wildly.) Roger delivers one monologue to Florence's phone mail, and another to a bunch of heedless twenty-something kids at a party. It's a poignant expression of mortality by a man who's finally growing into his life. 
   
   'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' 
   
   Music Box Films Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist in 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.' 
   
   A stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine—the news about "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is nothing but good. Niels Arden Oplev directed this first of three feature films, in Swedish with English subtitles, to be adapted from the widely admired Millennium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson. The crime at the center of the mystery is the coldest of cases in a very cold climate. Forty years ago, a young woman named Harriet Vanger vanished during the course of a family gathering on a private island. Now her uncle, obsessed with her loss, has hired a disgraced journalist as his private detective, and instructed him to concentrate on the Vanger family, with its history of Fascist leanings and general nastiness. 
   
   Scene: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 1:16 Watch a scene from "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," a Swedish thriller based on the bestselling novel by the late Stieg Larsson. Video courtesy of Music Box Films. 
   
   Michael Nyqvist plays the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist. He's very good, a sophisticated actor who's thoroughly comfortable in the role of an urban sophisticate. But all eyes, including his, are on Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed—and in at least two ways tortured—young woman who hacks into Mikael's life and becomes his uninvited co-investigator. 
   
   Lisbeth is a mystery within the mystery. "How did you turn out this way?" the journalist asks her, as well he might. The clues to that question are shockingly persuasive but inevitably incomplete. The mystery of what happened to Harriet Vanger is much more abstract, since she vanished so long ago, but the techniques involved in solving it are intriguing, a computer-age update of such classic films as "Blowup" (teasing out information from photographs), "The Conversation" and "Blow Out" (doing the same with sound recordings). And Mikael and Lisbeth are a matchlessly mismatched couple who complement each other all the same in what amounts to intimate file-sharing. 
   
   'The Art of the Steal' 
   
   IFC Films Albert C. barnes with his dog Fidèle in 'The Art of the Steal.' 
   
   After Don Argott's "The Art of the Steal" played the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival last fall, the Journal assigned a Philadelphia cultural reporter, Julia Klein, to write an article about the documentary, which deals with the bitter cultural battle that ensued when the Barnes Foundation decided to move its peerless collection of post-Impressionist paintings from its gallery in suburban Merion, Pa. to downtown Philadelphia. Now that the film is in commercial release, I'll say only that Ms. Klein judged it to be a skillful though far from impartial summary of a complex subject, while I found it fascinating for a number of reasons, balanced reporting not among them. 
   
   The complexity flows from the nature of the conflict, which pitted partisans of the Barnes credo—maintaining the collection as a private adjunct to the foundation's educational function—against civic, political and philanthropic advocates of making the paintings available to the largest number of people. (The film comes down firmly on the side of Barnes loyalists.) And though the final decision to move the collection has been made, the bitterness still flows from the question of whether that decision violated provisions of the trust that established the foundation. (The film makes a vigorous case for the notion that it did.) What "The Art of the Steal" documents most dramatically is the irresistible pull of irreplaceable art. 
   
   'Repo Men' 
   
   All too often in studio films—especially rotten ones like Universal's "Repo Men"—you can hear the studio notes. They're the needless explanations inserted into scripts at the insistence of production executives who fear that filmgoers won't be able to understand what's going on without help. "The thing is," Jude Law's character muses helpfully in this film, "I have an artificial heart, and she has an artificial everything else. It's just two parts of the same puzzle. Maybe it's not just her I'm trying to save." The real puzzle is how a major studio could put its name on such a heartless piece of hack work. 
   
   Watch a clip from the movie "Repo Men," a science-fiction thriller starring Jude Law. Video courtesy of Universal. 
   
   "Repo Men" shouldn't be confused with Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man," to which it bears no resemblance, or "Repo! The Genetic Opera," a bizarre 2008 flop from which it repossessed a premise and plenty more. In a sci-fi future when organ replacements are routine and financed like cars, Mr. Law's Remy, a repo man for a transplant company called The Union, retrieves organs—violently and graphically—from customers who have fallen behind in their payments. Until, that is, he must go into hock for a new ticker of his own. 
   
   The film starts out as a cheerfully lurid buddy picture, with Forest Whitaker as Jake, Remy's dim-bulb partner in disorganization. Enrique Chediak's cinematography does right by David Sandefur's handsome production design. And authentic looniness looms when Remy and Beth (Alice Braga), the extensively transplanted and retrofitted girl he is trying to save, perform grisly extirpations on one another. Yet "Repo Men" is basically a soulless slasher flick, and one that demeans its gifted performers. The cast includes Carice van Houten in a small, drab role as Remy's wife. You'd never guess she's the dazzling Dutch actress who starred as the heart and soul of Paul Verhoeven's World War II thriller "Black Book." 
   
   Note to studio: get a soul transplant. 
   
   Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
target: – Repo Men, a sci-fi thriller about men who repossess organs, is probably supposed to be biting commentary on divisive issues like health care, but critics are united in shouting it down: “Let the 2010 Razzies race begin!” declares Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter. “Blood soaked, derivative and increasingly ridiculous,” Repo Men is an “in-your-face mess that never knows what it wants to be when it grows up” and telegraphs its plot twists “a century in advance." On paper, the cast—Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber—looks great, but this “heartless piece of hack work” demeans them, writes Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal. “Note to studio: get a soul transplant.” The movie “sacrifices subtlety for the obvious, and originality for the tried-and-true—or, more often, the tried-and-trite,” writes Stephen Whitty of the Star-Ledger. “It’s a film to be endured more than experienced.” Roger Ebert can’t figure out if the film’s supposed to be a comedy. When Law decapitates three people with one swing of a hacksaw, he writes for the Chicago Sun-Times, “what are people supposed to think? Is this an action scene, or satire? Does it make any difference?”