Repo! The Genetic Opera

Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Cleverly conceived but poorly executed, this grab-fest of pop culture allusions doesn't have the narrative depth or musical style to make good on its promises. Repo! The Genetic Opera guns very blatantly for "cult" status (midnight screenings, sing-alongs, costume contests, etc.), squandering its rich story and setting along the way. As a result, it winds up lost between Rocky Horror Picture Show-style camp send-up and the self-conscious horror fun of Land of the Dead.

Like that George Romero zombie-fest, Repo's future (2056) is one of stark class divisions marked by urban wastes where crime, corporate greed and hedonism run equally rampant. Responding to an epidemic of organ failures, big pharma patriarch Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) has taken over the world with GeneCo. The company sells replacements to people whose organs are failing, then repossesses the vital body part when customers can't make their payments. It's so much like the mortgage crisis that it's surprising the connection is never drawn.

The set-up is full of such possibilities, as is Repo's cast of pop culture demi-icons. Sorvino adapts his usual mob boss typecast into a terminally ill, legacy-obssessed CEO. Paris Hilton plays herself exquisitely: the spoiled, trend-setting, surgery- and painkiller-addicted, aspiring pop star daughter to Sorvino's businessman-emperor. Anthony Stewart Head plays Nathan Wallace, father of demure heroine Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega) and (secretly) GeneCo's gut-spilling Repo Man, manipulating audiences' built-in adoration from his years as Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
But for all this zeitgeist-tapping wink-nudgery, Repo leans too heavily on third rate music and witless writing. The songs – with a few exceptions – are virtually indistinguishable hard rock pastiche with no style or logic except putting bad dialogue to music (something they barely succeed in doing). To make matters worse, the script being harmonized is overwhelmingly uninspired, especially compared with the clever double entendres and tireless pacing of ostensible forbearer Rocky Horror.

Finally, the world presented by Repo writers Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich remains frustratingly unexplored. The film's core is a melodrama involving the aspiring GeneCo heirs and divergent father figures Nathan and Rotti, while a fascinating civilization on the brink of extinction remains little more than an atmospheric background. It's as frustrating as the idea of Children of Men unfolding entirely inside the Tate Modern's upper-class fortress. How pointlessly limiting! Given our cultural moment's own anarchy anxieties, it's a shame that Repo stays couched in the plush upholstery of postmodern aristocratic farce when there's so much more to sing about.

This review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.