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Repo Man (1984)


Repo Man (1984)



3/10



Starring
Harry Dean Stanton
Emilio Estevez


Directed by Alex Cox


After I finished watching the film, I had one of those moments. I couldn’t find anything good to say about it, even though it’s a cult classic and was met with critical acclaim upon release. Not everyone will like every movie that receives universal praise, and today, with this movie, I’m part of that "everyone." The movie felt disjointed. Even though it introduced an alien sci-fi vibe early on, the connection between that and everything else felt like plain silly writing. I felt the directing needed work, and it was way too obvious that someone with little to no idea of how to pull something like this off was in the driver’s seat. The movie was written and directed by Alex Cox.

Our lead is a young man from the ’80s with a punk rock vibe. He’s a dropout who wants to coast through life without putting in much effort. His character was hard for me to digest—maybe because I wasn’t a teenager at the time. He just lost his job as a store clerk and his girlfriend to a friend.

After seeing his girl with his friend, Otto is walking down the street when a man offers him money to drive a car and follow him. The man lies to Otto, who believes him, but the moment Otto starts the car to drive off, he’s attacked by another man. He manages to escape with the car and follows the first man to a garage of some sort. Otto realizes then that the man is a repo man and is offered a job, which he turns down.

He goes home to his parents, who look like hippies, only to find out they’ve given money promised to him to a televangelist. So, he takes the repo man job he was offered earlier.

Before we meet Otto (played by Emilio Estevez), we see a man driving fast who is stopped by a cop. The cop asks him to open the trunk of his car. When the trunk is opened, a bright light shines out, and the cop is killed—or, more accurately, vaporized, with only his shoes left behind.

The car the man was driving is also wanted, and Otto and his fellow repo men are after it. But remember, there’s something alien in the trunk. As the movie develops, we learn more about the contents of the car and why the man was driving with it.

Regardless of how the plot sounds, the movie just didn’t do it for me. Alex Cox did a follow-up comic and another movie to this, called Repo Chick.


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