Joshua Reviews Alex Cox’s Repo Chick [DVD Review]

Alex Cox is an interesting filmmaker, to say the least.

Whether it be hugely popular cult fare like Repo Man, or Criterion Collection fodder Walker and Sid & Nancy, Cox has been a filmmaker that either most people haven’t heard of, or one that simply doesn’t mesh with most.

However, he’s back with a neo-sequel (although it’s better described as some sort of unholy follow-up, kind of like that cousin you dread seeing on holidays and continue to proclaim that you have no earthly connection to) to arguably his most beloved film, Repo Man.

Entitled Repo Chick, the film features the tag line ‘an unlikely hero in a chaotic world.’ However, people will be shocked as to just how little chaos reigns in this absolutely dreadful pile of kind-of-politically charged filmmaking.

The film sadly follows the hilariously named Pixxi De La Chasse, the self-centered famous-for-being-famous proxy for someone like Paris Hilton, who in order to regain the ability to earn her $77 million inheritance, must get a job.   In a poor economy, she becomes a repo ‘chick,’ and goes on the hunt for an antique train that is promised to garner a $1,000,000 reward for the person bringing it in.

Toss in a collection of eco-terrorists, left over Cold war era nukes, and a cavalcade of dreadfully heavy handed discussions of the current state of the world economy and politics, and you have easily one of the worst and most cartoonishly absurd piles of cinematic awfulness that would have Brett Ratner driving into a brick wall after seeing this, for fear that he may ultimately become dumber for living in a world where this exists.

Within films like Repo Man, or even a film like Walker (which is this writer’s favorite film of the cult icon’s canon), director Alex Cox has always been relatively over the top, but with something a bit more going on below the surface.   Never tight lipped about his beliefs within his films, here, he’s absurdly in your face, with beliefs so inherently scatterbrained that you would believe that a class of thirteen-year-old boys penned this film’s horrifically blunt and laugh free screenplay.

Penned by Cox as well, the cult favorite is working on a level not quite lived in by many other names.   Featuring a series of shots with a backdrop akin to finger painted portraits crafted by cocaine fueled cartoonist, shoddy CGI is seemingly the norm here.   Mixed in with shots of toy trains, ‘green army men’ like figures apparently meant to look like disproportionate humans and weirdly surrealist black and white sequences, the film’s style here is just as fever dream-esque as its screenplay.   Some parts are engaging visually. There is something to be said for a filmmaker attempting to do something visually striking for a feature film, but here, it is so bizarrely mixed and matched, that it doesn’t say anything interesting, nor move the narrative forward in any meaningful way.

However, it’s the film’s superficiality that may be its biggest sin.

Ultimately, this film is inherently shallow.   Not willing to discuss any of the film’s massive collection of topics, themes or issues on any meaningful level or with any meaningful depth, Repo Chick suffers from being just as vapid and wholly uninteresting as its celeb-utant lead. Toss in the film’s uninteresting yet somewhat engaging visual style, and you have too much of something that just isn’t all that interesting.   That in and of itself may be saying something intriguing about today’s society (we do live in a very superficial world both intra and inter-personally).   We today simply don’t care about the depth of given subjects, concepts or relationships.   Here is no different.   We see, learn, and hear very few things, but about a lot of subjects.   It’s an interesting idea, but this film neither earns that intensely deep reading, nor deserves such a reading.   It’s just me trying to somehow, some way, justify spending the absurdly long 90 minutes that this film requests of its viewer.

And then there is the cast.   Oh this film’s cast.

Repo Chick stars Jaclyn Jonet as our lead, Pixxi, who gives the film’s only worthwhile performance.   She gives the silly words Cox has asked her to read this sense of Looney Tunes style surrealism that is really charming.   For such an unbelievable film, you seem to believe what this performance is attempting to do, and the film shines when Cox asks her, and her alone, to really hold the film on her apparently capable shoulders.   She camps the film up when asked, but also gives the film a sense of reality, or at least this world’s reality, that makes it a perfect b-movie performance.

However, her supporting cast is wholly uninteresting.   Spearheaded by the otherwise fun Miguel Sandoval, the film is a horribly missed chance to bring back a truly beloved cult, b-movie film series.   No one here gives a worthwhile supporting performance, even someone like Karen Black or even Rosanna Arquette.   The film gives you caricatures instead of anything resembling a character, making this a nearly unwatchable mess from an acting standpoint.

As a DVD release, this is weak at best.  Featuring only a trailer and a half hour long making of featurette, the DVD is as packed as a film this underwhelming truly deserves.

A surface level piece of shlock filmmaking, Repo Chick asks the viewer to withstand 90 minutes of candy colored punk filmmaking with the blunt touch of a guitar straight to the skull, and honestly, the latter sounds far more appetizing.

Particularly if the man swinging the guitar is as uninterested at giving us something deep as Alex Cox.