* out of *****

Sometimes, there’s nothing better than a popcorn movie. One that doesn’t really have a message or intense complexity. One in which the viewer need only sit back and be entertained.

That is exactly what Repo Men promised to be. An action movie in which repo men take artificial organs from those who can’t afford them, Repo Men’s plot feels perfect for a popcorn flick. Perhaps it could have been.

But, no. After the great-looking, action-packed opening sequences in which Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) attack debtors and repossess their organs, Repo Men puts on its serious face and begins shaking its fist angrily to those who just want entertainment.

When a botched repossession requires Remy to get an artificial heart of his own, Repo Men enters political territory, trying to paint a world in which soulless corporate greed outweighs the life of the citizenry. However, with all the subtlety of a Uwe Boll video game adaptation and none of the chutzpah, Repo Men’s desperate plea for universal health care is ham-fisted at best — to say nothing of its half-hearted anti-capitalist overtures. Just when it looks like the message might have weight, the film pulls back to show more action, leaving it fragmented and pointless.

The setting of Repo Men is a futuristic metropolis that appears one step short of flying cars. But, outside of the technology and some small futuristic touches, the world of the movie doesn’t look much different from 2010. This setting looks like nothing more than an attempt to bring the movie’s message closer to the viewer’s home. Instead, it goes beyond the point a willing suspension of disbelief could still operate.

People can buy artificial organs at the mall, but they’re still driving minivans? Please.

In a world in which everything is made of sleek and futuristic metal, the characters are entirely wooden. Remy is a stock action hero with a heart, and Law plays him as if Remy’s artificial replacement heart is the one doing the feeling. Jake, on the other hand, has the potential to be an interesting character, but he is overloaded with so much bad dialogue and false machismo that not even Whitaker can make him watchable. The only character in Repo Men worth anything is Liev Schreiber’s Frank — Remy and Jake’s boss — and even that’s only because Schreiber has stoic bad guy down to such a science that he even made X-Men Origins: Wolverine decent.

The only thing close to a saving grace for this movie is its action. Repo Men’s action scenes look good, and they certainly pack enough testosterone to get the blood pumping. One of them does cross the line into ridiculousness, however. Remy and girlfriend Beth (Alice Braga) have killed a group of guards, leaving only a few civilians between them and their goal … until said civilians begin pulling weapons — including a meat cleaver — out of their bags to fight off the couple. Outside of that one scene, however, the action is intense, and serves as a reminder of how good the movie could have been, were it not mired in its heavy, overwrought plot.

Though there are plenty of action movies with a message (Blood Diamond, the first Matrix) that are both entertaining and insightful, Repo Men is not one of those movies. The filmmakers cut back on the entertainment in the name of politics, but that didn’t deliver that effectively, either. As such, Repo Men is neither entertaining nor insightful. It’s mostly just terrible.