Repo! The Genetic Opera (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed on DVD

If there is one thing that I’ve learned when it comes to films, it’s that raised expectations lead to heartbreak.  Thus I should have known better when the trailer for Repo! The Genetic Opera hit the internet last year and left me entranced.  It looked like bastard child of a midnight movie, dragged kicking and screaming into the world by the perverted midwife tag-team of Doctors Frank-N-Furter and Eldon Tyrell!  It was everything I wanted in a film, hitting all of my marks  for cinematic gratification.  A dystopic future world driven into the ground by an evil corporation?  Check!  Outlandish, apocalyptic visuals?  Check!  Rock’n’roll?  Check!  Actors that I’ve long admired finally being given a big-screen role?  Check, check and check again!  Paris Hilton?  Well, nothing is perfect…  Imagine my disappointment then, when I discovered that, while the hotel heiress surprisingly avoided offending me, the rest of the film spurned by affections and left me jilted at the altar.  Repo! The Genetic Opera tries to win my heart but, in many respects, falls oh, so far from my desires.

In the world of Repo! a calamity has befallen humanity (hasn’t it always?), resulting in a massive upsurge in organ failure.  A biotech company, Geneco, steps up to meet the people’s needs, but they demand a high price.  Utilizing the political capital that you can apparently generate by saving the world, they pressurize politicians into making it legal to reclaim organs from those who can’t fulfill their end of the contract.  Fail to meet your monthly installments and you have to face the knife of Repo!  But the founder of Geneco, Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvinio)  is himself dying, and he judges his children unworthy of his mantle.  Who can he turn to, and what skeletons lurk in his closet?

What follows is a rather convoluted tale of necrotic drug theft, blind opera singers and elective surgery.  The story is simple, yet it is presented in such a tortured way that things quickly become confused.  The story focuses on the daughter of the chief Repo-man, played by Anthony Stewart Head, but we are sidetracked by a man who steals pain-killer from the corpses of the Repo’s victims, as well as the antics of Largo’s children.  The grave robber in particular does little but increase the film’s running time, with the others simply required to perform their one-note demonstrations of why they can’t become ruler of the organ-empire.  Of the three children, Hilton surprisingly rises to the top of the pile, with her brothers either preening from behind a flesh-mask that allows little emoting, or summoning up the most impotent version of an ‘uncontrollable rage’ that I’ve seen for a long time.  We don’t spend enough time on them for their characters to become interesting or important to us, and spend too much for them to be simply functional.

The other big problem with the film is the music – and that’s a big problem with a musical.  The film really does lean towards opera, at least in as much as I found many of the lyrics hard to decipher!  Many of the numbers move from speech to song and back again as they progress, which renders the film a little ‘artsier’ than something like Rocky Horror, but also means that nothing reaches the catchiness of any of that film’s numbers.  I won’t be singing any of these (badly) in the shower.  Perhaps that’ll change with time, but I watched the film a few hours ago and I can’t remember a single song.

On the plus side, some of the singing is really very good, although you’d expect no less with Sarah Brightman and Anthony Stewart Head lending their lungs to the proceedings.  The visuals are also stunning.  The film assaults you with highly saturated colors and high contrast lighting which, combined with gothic sets (the house that Head’s character inhabits is particularly interesting), really brings the film’s world to life, or rather death.  But these elements couldn’t keep me from losing interest in the film as it staggered towards its ending, and even the finale (the Genetic Opera of the title) couldn’t resuscitate my interest.  I’d love to see the world of Repo! reincarnated, and the film certainly sets up a sequel, but this trip left me cold.