It's Just Movies

— by JASON EAKEN —

Here’s a fun game: watch the red band trailer for “Repo Men” below, then try to imagine what its normal preview might look like. Surprisingly difficult, right? I was letting my mind drift away, thinking about the recent influx of red band trailers and what that means, and then when I came back to “Repo Men,” I realized its marketing team has given us a gift.

They have helpfully cut down their film to an astoundingly short 2 minutes, 28 seconds.

I don’t know if it is eligible for this year’s live-action short film Academy Award, but I betcha it would boast the biggest budget.

This action-adventure-buddy short film hits all the cliches of the genre, and the movie– er, trailer– is very straightforward. We see our lead actors, their relationship, the villain, the main plot (which is irrelevant anyhow but sure why not — in the future artificial organs are created and sold … and then repossessed if the buyer can’t make the payments), a love interest (and so a love scene), gratuitous nudity at a strip club, and countless action sequences, stabbings, slashings, beheadings, throat-slittings, and weaponry, along with the obligatory line of dialogue, “I’m going to end this.” Maybe he said “finish this,” I already forgot.

The point is, you don’t need to see this movie anymore, because you’ve essentially seen it already here and maybe saw it a few times in the last few years with different actors and a different title-font. This one’s got Jude Law and Forest Whitaker and the often mis-used and under-used Liev Schreiber. The movie has the well-made, increasingly common visual style of many action movies today. If you confuse this one with “Surrogates,” few will possess the memory to correct you. Or the energy.

It’s not that “Repo Men” looks bad, it just looks like another other different but similar movie. From the trailer, we know everything there is to know. Man at work hasn’t ever thought about the ramifications of his job until he becomes his own target. Instead, why don’t you just watch “Minority Report” again? That might be nice … I haven’t seen it in a while, myself.

Yes, the movie may be especially prescient right now. The metaphor of a person’s “life” being thoughtlessly, violently destroyed because they can’t pay the bills isn’t being missed by anyone.

The film is based on a book by Eric Garcia, the very good writer of “Matchstick Men” and “Anonymous Rex,” a crime novel with a detective who is really a dinosaur in a “human suit.” I recall really liking that book especially. I bought it in paperback, I bet it’s at your local library. I bet there are other books there as well. “The Repossession Mambo” is the name of the book on which the movie is based.

So now I’ve mentioned two other movies and three books you could spend your time on instead of this movie. Also, I really loved “Avatar,” so if you haven’t seen that, there’s one more for you.

Source: Trailer Addict

Follow Jason Eaken on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EAKEN.