The film takes place in the not-so-distant future, where a corporation named GeneCo has revolutionized the healthcare system by offering widespread transplants after an epidemic of organ failures threatens the world's populations. The only catch is that GeneCo reserves the right to repossess these organs if recipients don't make their payments, and enlists Repo Men to retrieve the used body parts. After decades in charge of GeneCo, CEO Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) announces that he is stepping down due to health reasons, leaving his empire to be divided among his three children Luigi (Bill Moseley), Pavi (Ogre) and Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton) – each of whom is unsuitable to take over the reins for various reasons.
Meanwhile, a sheltered young girl named Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega) escapes from the imprisonment of her father Nathan's (Anthony Stewart Head) palatial estate, only to uncover a sordid, blood-stained trail of deceit, betrayal and death that binds her family to the Rottis. Before long, Shilo, her father and the Rottis converge upon the annual staging of The Genetic Opera, where longstanding grudges and unresolved conflicts come bubbling to the surface at the same time that the world's pre-eminent entertainment event unfolds in front of the world populace.
While I am fairly certain that at some point I've made a purchase from one of those teen-targeting mall stores that stock the full line of Manic Panic hair products, Korn t-shirts and Nightmare Before Christmas knick-knacks, I am in no way the target audience for Repo!. All that means is that I was unfamiliar with the characters, story and songs before seeing the film, and was no more interested in them afterward. Writer-director Bousman, going out on the same kind of limb that previously snapped beneath Richard Kelly during his sprawling, disastrous Southland Tales, manages to preserve a tenuous balance between crowd-pleasing and pure self-indulgence, crafting a movie that possesses all of the elements of blockbuster genre filmmaking but organizes them in a way that's too idiosyncratic to connect with a mainstream audience. In other words, Repo! feels destined if not outright designed to be a cult film, which will no doubt earn it some serious credentials with the Hot Topic crowd even if their sunnier counterparts decide to see High School Musical 3 instead.
Working from Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich's play-turned-script, Bousman creates a visual landscape different than but not dissimilar to the Saw films – one writ large against a global backdrop but still littered with the disembodied carcasses of souls who aren't possessed of the fortune or fortitude to endure the twisted designs of people with absolute power but indeterminate mental stability. GeneCo looms ominously over Bousman's postapocalyptic world like the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, while the characters operate on a decidedly more visceral level, embracing the broad melodrama of the material to terrifically bombastic (if occasionally campy) effect: Where Harrison Ford once watched mournfully as the rain trickled down his adversary's elegantly dying face, Paris Hilton injects her face and body with gallons of chemicals as repo men comb the streets for organs to graphically reclaim.
Much like everything else in Repo, the music is often over the top and seldom bound by the limits of conventional structures, but Bousman has acknowledged that with this film he wanted to put the opera in rock opera. Some of the songs work individually and others feel like they could only exist within the context of the story, but overall, he, Zdunich and Smith do an impressive job bringing the film's central concept to life in a way that feels cohesive even if by design its components are too unwieldy to work as a singular idea.
At the same time, their efforts to tell a proper story sometimes don't pay off within the rest of the film's dreamlike, musical atmosphere, while others merely repeat themselves; the comic book exposition is a good idea, for example, but it pads the running time without necessarily adding information that isn't already included in the songs. And the surplus of characters provides multiple opportunities for show-stopping musical numbers, but that's unfortunately what they sometimes do – stop the show. Thankfully, all of the cast members – including Ms. Hilton - are more than capable of belting out Zdunich and Smith's songs, but whether it's the format and construction of their particular compositions or just the set-piece structure of musicals in general, each opportunity to showcase a single performer feels increasingly like we're straying further from the main thread of the narrative at a time when the film should be tying everything together.
The truth is, however, it remains undetermined how much individual or specific criticisms of Repo! will be to both the folks already predisposed to love it and those determined to hate it; many minds are already made up and require little evidence (positive or negative) to further confirm their feelings. Meanwhile, like myself, there will be many who languish somewhere in the middle, accepting its existence without offense but leaving it to others to celebrate or condemn. But Repo! has one quality – namely, sincerity - that distinguishes it from the throng of b-movies and genre films with which it shares artistic company, because no one who made this film could possibly have expected a home-run blockbuster from this material, much less a bona fide box office success, but all involved nevertheless put their time, effort and in some cases careers on the line to bring it to the screen.
Ultimately, Repo! The Genetic Opera is like few other movies in so many different respects, but whether their sum total means that you'll be first or dead last in line to see it on Friday night, the most important of them may be that its existence serves as proof that you can respect a film without necessarily liking it.
3 out of 5 Stars, 6/10 Score
