Repo Man

This movie reminded me, in a way, of Buckeroo Banzai. That movie has a hundred and one ideas crammed into its run time. Watching it, I felt like I was on the outside of an inside joke that nobody cared to explain. The universe was original and unique, but I always felt at arms length from it. Repo Man takes the opposite approach. Whereas Buckeroo was overstuffed with ideas it didn’t want to explain, Repo is stuffed with unfinished sketches of concepts it might consider fleshing out one day, except it can’t explain them. Buckeroo answers all “why” questions with “because we said so”; Repo Man stalls for time, gets you to look in another direction, and runs away. All of the products that have white labels and generic names (a can of something edible labeled FOOD), the backstory behind the rivalry between the repo guys and the brothers, the punks robbing places, everything about the Chevy Malibu … Repo Man doesn’t explain anything because it is incapable of doing so. It flits from scene to scene, creating this surreal world that should be interesting but isn’t fleshed out enough to be, never giving anyone or anything more than a cursory outlining. The only thing engineered in this movie designed to leave an impression is the weirdness itself. Anything else is fodder for that purpose, characters and plot included. It is startlingly empty. Because of that, the movie has a ton of filler. I didn’t think a 90 minute movie could have so much filler as Repo Man. I got 50 minutes in and thought “okay, when is the plot gonna kick in and take us away from these random scenes of cars being repossessed”, and it didn’t happen until about 10 minutes to go. It is not an exaggeration to say an editor focused on trimming this down to the story essentials could get this to 45 minutes or less. It would still be an incoherent mess, because a story in the traditional sense of the word is almost non-existent, but it would make more sense (1 is greater than 0) than keeping in all the fluff. For a while, I tried to convince myself this was quirky and weird and coming from a singular voice. I tried to hold out hope satire or gallows humor would show up, and an actual story would unfold. I kept hoping characters would find purpose or show growth. None of that happened. I still don’t care much for Buckeroo Banzai, but I have a new appreciation for it, because it committed to something. You either get that or you don’t. I don’t see anything to get with Repo Man. Like its titular character, it only takes.