In a not too distant future you can buy yourself a new artificial organ from The Union if you have the funds. And if you don't then you can make a payment plan. Sounds like a good idea, and like the salesman Frank (Liev Schreiber) tells you “you owe it to yourself... and to your family”. The downside is that if you can't make your payments your artificial heart, liver, pancreas or what have you, will be repossessed if you fall behind more than three months. The repo men are required to ask if you would like to have an ambulance standing by but, honestly, that's merely for forms sake. More often than not they don't seem to bother asking until the client is already unconscious.
Remy (Jude Law) is one of the most successful repo men at Union. He and his pal Jake (Forest Whitaker) are very good at what they do. Remy and Jake are cheerfully sociopathic about their jobs. They have a shared background that goes all the way back to school, and then through their military careers onto their work for The Union. They seem to be two pees in a pod, which gives us some motivation for Jake's actions. Remy balances this very down-and-dirty job with a reasonably normal home life with his wife Carol (Carice van Houten) and their son Peter (Chandler Canterbury). It quite quickly becomes obvious that Remy's job is a point of contention between him and his wife and she demands that he make a choice between his job and his family. He chooses work. Remy and Jake have this reoccurring line between them “a job is a job”.One point you can make here, just as Remy eventually does, is that a job is not just a job.
On a routine repo Remy goes after T-Bone (RZA), a musician he admires, to get back a heart. When he goes to use the de fibrillation pads the wires are faulty and he shorts himself out by mistake. When he next wakes up he has been given a replacement heart and winds up in debt to The Union. It is one of those “I owe my soul to the company store”-kind of deals. With his new artificial heart he also gets a quickening of his conscience, which creates problems. He can no longer make the move into sales, like he has planned in order to win his wife and son back, and he can’t relay repo anymore. He is actually less heartless with an artificial heart than he was with his organic heart. There's some irony there. Before Remy knows it he is on the run from his former employee and all his former colleagues.
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