Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) are repo men. They harvest mechanical organs for The Union with bloody efficiency, and they love it. But then, while on a routine call, a faulty piece of company equipment electrocutes Remy and he wakes up to find himself with an artificial heart he cannot afford, loaned by the Union. Suddenly, in the same situation as his victims, Remy finds his artificial heart has given him real human feelings, and refuses to repo. He falls behind on payments, and is in danger of being targeted by the agency he used to work for. It’s the standard sci-fi, evil agent learns empathy by physically becoming like his prior enemy, and revolts against the corporation he used to work for. We’ve seen it done countless times, most recently in Avatar and District 9.

Repo Men suffers from awkward shifts in tone and characterization. Remy turns against his employer because he realizes killing innocent people is wrong, but he does so by killing innocent people employed by the Union. The script is likewise schizophrenic, unable to decide if it’s a satire, an action film, a parable, a surreal fantasy, science fiction, or a Bjork music video. Most sequences work independently of each other to some extent, but as a whole, they don’t fit together.

The best sequence in the film occurs toward the end, when Remy breaks into the Union’s main headquarters to wipe out the central computers, thereby erasing records of everyone’s debt. Remy and his new girlfriend (Alice Braga) must scan the barcodes of each of their replacement organs to close their accounts. The problem? The organs are still inside their bodies, and Remy’s girlfriend is an organ shopaholic. She’s got artificial eyes, ears, throat – you name it, she’s got it. As Remy cuts her open and probes her insides with a scanning gun, the scene is eroticized. We get close-ups of heavy breathing, penetration, and clothes being stripped away. It’s bizarre, but it works.

Unfortunately, it’s completely unnecessary to the rest of the plot. And, as we find out in a cheap twist ending, a third of the plot has been superfluous as well.

Remy’s refusal to repo makes little sense, as he has spent his entire life taking pleasure in killing others, and even continues to be entertained by violence well after refusing to work for the Union. His morality is inconsistent as well: he’s not willing to kill to make his payments, but he is willing to kill to wipe out his debt. It seems what Remy really views as immoral is not murder, but making payments. The only reason this character is at all watchable is because of the charismatic Jude Law, but Remy himself is a poorly written sociopath.

The same can be said of his partner, Jake, a selfish, unfeeling drone who honestly cannot understand why anyone would think killing for a paycheck is wrong. Forest Whitaker has enough talent to give Jake some semblance of humanity, but he’s not allowed much by the script. Liev Schreiber plays a generic corporate bad guy, and Carice van Houten the generic wife-from-hell, but their characters are clearly defined as evil by the script, and aren’t given a moment of sympathy in the film. And Alice Braga as Beth, the homeless nightclub singer that Remy suddenly falls in love with, seems an odd choice and lacks any natural chemistry with Law.

The cinematography benefits from the glossy colors of the futuristic city at night, but the compositions and camera movements are bland in a film that could easily get away with extreme stylization. Just look at Repo: The Genetic Opera, a film with a suspiciously similar plot that, while not great, definitely lends itself to visual manipulation. Repo Men has a high-contrast sheen to it, but, instead of enhancing the mood, it merely gets the job done.

The music choices are inconsistent as well. While early scenes play a salsa mix by Perez Prado over a montage of Remy and Jake repossessing organs (perhaps a sequence that might fittingly be called the Repossession Mambo), the majority of the film features nothing but a standard action score of loud blasts and mindless energy. Repo Men desperately wants to feel like a dark comedy, playing “ironic” music like “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by The Mamas & The Papas, but at its core there’s nothing but an action film here – and a poor one.

Visions of the future can be worth a ticket price alone, but there’s not too much different about the future portrayed in Repo Men, aside from the artificial organs and hot glue gun stitches. There’s more Chinese lettering in the cityscape, but everyone drives contemporary cars and talks on Generation 2 iPhones. It’s yet another wasted opportunity by the film that can only be attributed to imaginative laziness.