Repo! The Genetic Opera is what happens when filmmakers set out to make a cult movie. They’ve got the cult part right: outlandish characters, fetishistic undertones, nonstop song-and-dance, inventive camerawork, high-contrast lighting, Paris Hilton, etc.
Now, about that tricky movie part: there’s no story, no plot, no characters we can care about, no emotional investment, no reason whatsoever to watch. I appreciated 5 or 10 minutes of Repo! – it’s certainly something different – but I was exhausted after 100 minutes of this nearly unwatchable mess, and looking back I’m surprised I managed to make it through at all.
A comic-book montage gives us the setting: in the not-so-distant future, an epidemic of organ failures has ravaged the world and led to the success of GeneCo, an organ transplant company that sends out repo men to retrieve hearts and livers and spleens should anyone miss a payment.
Slowly, our cast of characters is introduced: Graverobber (Terrance Zdunich), a sort of narrator; Shilo (Alexa Vega), a young girl with a rare disease; her overprotective father Nathan (Anthony Head), who also moonlights as a repo man; Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), the owner of GeneCo; his three repellent children, played by Paris Hilton, Bill Moseley, and Ogre from Skinny Puppy; and opera star Blind Mag, played by renowned soprano Sarah Brightman in what – as far as I can tell – is her feature film debut.
I wish I could describe the plot, but there’s none to be found here: throughout the duration of the movie, these characters simply sing backstory to us, mostly about Shilo’s mother, who died during childbirth. During the course of the actual movie, nothing at all seems to happen; a few characters die at the end, but that feels perfunctory more than anything.
And oh yeah, this is an opera – every single bit of godawful dialogue is sung to us during unmemorable, mostly awful songs that span a number of genres. Now, if you like the music here you might enjoy the movie. Me, I wasn’t exactly humming Can’t Get It up If the Girl’s Breathing on my way out of the cinema.
But it isn’t all bad. Brightman is terrific, and I could easily watch and listen to her sing – no matter how bad the songs are – for the entirety of a film. Unfortunately, she has the smallest role here, and only participates in two of the songs. Zdunich, who wrote the screenplay and the original play the film is based on, is also good as our quasi-narrator, and sings the film’s best song, about drug addiction.
As for the rest of the cast, the less said the better. I think this is the first and last opera we’ll see from Paul Sorvino. Hilton is not only bad but seems to infect the other actors whenever she’s on the screen. At times this is embarrassing to watch.
Take The Rocky Horror Picture Show, replace the campy fun with dour sadism, and you’ll and up with Repo! Or, imagine one of the Saw pictures as a musical.
Director Darren Lynn Bousman cut his teeth on Saw II, III, and IV before moving on to this. Someday, Repo! will find its cult, but I doubt even the cult will consider it objectively good. All others – stay far away.
