Repo! The Genetic Opera

This movie made me: Confused

In the past, the phrase “and it’s a musical!” has often been used to make hypothetically ridiculous movies sound even more absurd. Now, at long last, people can use that phrase with complete honesty. Repo! The Genetic Opera takes place in the not-too-distant future where an epidemic of organ failure led to the creation of an organ lending system. People sign a contract with the all-powerful GeneCo, and are granted a new lease on life. But if any loaners miss a payment, the Repo Man appears and takes the product back in the most gruesome way possible… and it’s a musical!

With a premise such as this, director Darren Lynn Bousman (of Saw fame) should be expected to deliver something on the level of The Rocky Horror Picture Show by forgoing all sense of reason in favor of something bombastically bizarre and entertaining. Unfortunately, his pedestrian approach to the material only forgoes reason, with little of the bizarreness that the film desperately needs. It’s weird, all right, but for most of the film the characters simply sit and sing about their feelings, or about how the world sucks – hardly the kind of material that will make an audience go along with it.

The film follows Shiloh (Alexa Vega), a teenage girl with a blood disease so dangerous that her father Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head) keeps her locked up in her room. This is all the better for him, since it means he can hide his true identity from her – he is the vicious and unforgiving Repo Man, who stalks the streets to reclaim organs from unpaying customers. After a horrible accident that left Shiloh’s mother dead, Nathan found himself in debt to GeneCo’s president, Rotti Largo (a warbling Paul Sorvino), who has his hands full with his own children: dangerously violent Luigi (Bill Moseley), unhinged face-stealer Pavi (Orge), and spoiled surgery and drug-addicted Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton, obviously a stretch for her). But as Shiloh’s desire to know the outside world grows stronger, Nathan’s guilt over his horrendous actions grows with Largo’s need to find the new head of the company keeping the world alive.

To say Repo! isn’t scary is pointless, given the nature of the film. This is straight-up Victorian melodrama, from the complicated bickering families all the way to the blood-soaked finale (set, appropriately, in an opera house). But there must be something said for the lack of suspense the film creates. Most of the film has characters sitting (or occasionally pacing) and singing about what’s troubling them. It’s only a few times where people actually do something. And even when the Repo Man goes out to do his dirty work, the images are surprisingly subdued. Given that the director rose to fame as the helmer of the Saw sequels, one should certainly expect the deaths to be more gruesome than they are. It’s not that the film isn’t violent, but its violence is simple, and the effect watered down by the rambling inner monologues that follow and precede it.

The film actually works only a few times, and it’s probably not a coincidence that classical crossover singer Sarah Brightman (in her film debut) is present in all of them. As Blind Mag, GeneCo’s spokeswoman and opera star, Brightman’s wide eyes, crystal clear voice and Elvira-ish appearance is perfectly suited to what the film should be. Not to mention she is one of the few cast members who can actually sing, though Head displays a fine rock voice as well. Her duet with Vega, “Chase the Morning”, is exactly what the film should have been; it shows Bousman at his most inventive and is one of the few times where we completely understand what’s going on.

Shot in the kind of fuzzy light usually reserved nowadays for flashbacks, it comes as no surprise that when the flashbacks actually show up in Repo!, they’re rendered in comic book-style. We read and see pictures of the characters’ pasts, which is surely a case of the “show, don’t tell” rule that filmmakers are told to avoid in school. But that sums up the entirety of Repo! in a way. It tries to break the rules and redefine what a musical and a horror film can be, but ends up being an unexciting and confusing exercise in monotony. Filled with bland songs blandly performed by the cast (with one or two exceptions) Repo! should only be recommended for the curious who seriously don’t expect anything, because they’ll get exactly that.