Posted in: Movies, Review, Searchlight | Tagged: odessa, Sadie Sink

O'Dessa Aims High, But Doesn't Quite Deliver On Its Promise {Review}

O'Dessa fails at becoming a rock opera classic and instead is just like every dystopian story you have ever seen before.

O'Dessa feels like Scott Pilgrim without the charm, a dystopian story about the healing power of music that features songs that wouldn't crack the Billboard chart. Ambitious from the start, the film always feels stuck in second gear and never reaches the promise of its premise. Still, it features winning performances from Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr. and will feel familiar to anyone who has ever enjoyed other dystopian stories. Still, the weird tone and not-so-great music are too much of a distraction. It debuts on Hulu today.

O'Dessa Is An Amalgamation Of Many Things

Sink tries her best as a traveling troubadour, fated to save her dystopian world with the power of song. The Chosen One, if you will. We know this because it is repeated every five minutes or so. After losing her guitar, which was passed down for generations through her bloodline, she travels to the big city to get her guitar back and fulfill her destiny. That is where she meets Euri (Harrison), a stripper/singer who will remind you of Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element. If the film hunkered down and focused on O'Dessa's journey and less on the side missions these two get in, there is a germ of a good, tight story here.

But the film does not do that. Instead, it moves at a fast pace all over the periphery of the story. Many background characters just show up with no explanation and disappear just as fast. Why are they here all of a sudden? Who are they? We never find out. There is the big baddie's big brother eye that poses a significant threat and never gets paid off. And for a movie whose message is that love and song can conquer anything, there is a lot of violence instead. It would have been much better to spend more than the first five minutes with O'Dessa and her mother on their desolate farm and have a reason to root for her, but the film is not interested. Instead, it is obsessed with stylization and flash. It was frustrating watching what could have been an epic rock opera for a modern audience morph into a Mad Max/Hunger Games/insert-dystopian-title clone so fast.

That is not Sink's fault; she is just as good as ever. She is stepping into the light as a performer to watch, and her recent casting in the next Spider-Man should give her that final step into household name status. Here, she performs with gusto and does her best as O'Dessa. Harrison stands out and matches Sink's energy perfectly. Another complaint is that none of the other characters seem to have the writer's attention, which is a shame, as Regina Hall feels wasted.

Ultimately, this is one of those quirky big swing films that gets too wrapped up in its inventiveness to deliver on its promise successfully. Sink is worth watching for, but you will find yourself laughing a lot at things that shouldn't be funny, and by the end, it feels unearned. For a film that wants to pride itself on supposed originality, it is way too derivative to be considered anything other than a disappointment.

O'Dessa

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Review by Jeremy Konrad

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5/10

What could have been a rock opera for the ages instead becomes an amalgamation of every dystopian story ever told. Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr. are great together though.

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