On DVD: "Repo Men"

Miguel Sapochnik's nifty noirish sci-fi Repo Men looks like a major studio's take on material that's already been rehearsed elsewhere, whether in the droll indie Cold Souls or the cult-seeking Paris Hilton vehicle Repo! The Genetic Opera. (Even the title owes a debt to Alex Cox.) In a future America where - universal healthcare be damned - ailing consumers are obliged to buy replacement organs on credit from private corporations, Jude Law's Remy is a collector for leading organ provider The Union (motto: "Helping you get more out of you").

As paired with friend/former sparring partner Jake (Forest Whitaker), Remy spends his time tracking down those who've defaulted on their payments, taking back - with negotiable force - his employers' rightful property. (Squeamish viewers, look away now.) Yet as the opening scene - which finds Remy pecking out a presumably semi-autobiographical novel, "The Repossession Mambo", on an old manual typewriter - or our hero's delicate handling of a gifted music producer's heart suggests, this professional butcher has loftier ambitions for himself; after a workplace accident, he realises there may be more to life than ripping people open - although by that point, his own name has been added to another collector's list.

Sapochnik's art director past shows in the occasionally sketchy storytelling and the absolute attention to background detail; the feeling is that Universal have funded the filmmaker to construct lavishly dystopian sets (Blade Runner-style metropoli and shanty towns, a vast, wipe-clean organ manufacturing plant) around a standard, sometimes perfunctory B-movie plot. It's little surprise, given the director's background, that matter should come to a head on either side of "the Pink Door", a location spoken of with near-mythic reverence. The surprise is Law, an actor whose form in recent years has become as patchy as his hairline - yet one who knows how to pick a SF script, as Gattaca and A.I. demonstrated. Here, he shows signs of actually carrying a film - a lightweight film, admittedly - seguing skilfully between Cockney-inflected corporate goon, soulful marked man, and resourceful action hero.

Repo Men eventually devolves to the status of conventional lovers-on-the-run pic, complete with some very familiar reversals; by the time of the corridor fight that shamelessly rips off Park Chan-wook's OldBoy, you may well feel inclined to shout "Harvest some of your own ideas!" at the screen. Still, Sapochnik has an eye for affordably gorgeous actresses (Carice van Houten, Alice Braga), and the film has several of the other parts vital for engaging speculative fiction: a heart, a brain, even - as in Law's inventive dual use of the typewriter, the fate of the teenager employed as The Union's lung-wearing mascot, or the song cued by the bloody, Cronenbergian finale - some evidence of a funny bone.

Repo Men is released on DVD today.