Now available on Disney +, O’Dessa is the newest musical from the mind of Patti Cake$ writer/director Geremy Jasper. The anticipated musical that also recently played at the SXSW Film Festival stars Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink as O’Dessa. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, O’Dessa is heavy on set design, but is it light everywhere else?

O’Dessa Galloway (Sink) is the definition of a naive country bumpkin. Living on a dirt farm, her late father was a rambler (i.e. a traveling musician that never stays still) who told her at a young age that she was born to fulfill a prophecy to unite the world. After the passing of her mother, O’Dessa sets out to discover her destiny, but her naivete is immediately taken advantage of as Father Walt (Mark Boone Junior) and his crew steal her guitar. Determined to track down the guitar, the only thing her father left her, O’Dessa travels to Satylitte City. After discovering the Guitar in a pawn shop, she tries to track down a job to pay for it, which leads her to the club of Neon Dion (Regina Hall). It’s there she’s instantly smitten by dancer/gigolo Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who takes her under his wing and teaches her the ways of the land, all under the thumb of the Oz-like Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett).

Patti Cake$ was one of my favorite films of 2017, which excited me to dig into O’Dessa. I’m also someone who sees a lot of potential in Sadie Sink. All of this is why I was so profoundly disappointed with the final results of O’Dessa. For everything it does right, it does many more wrong and it all boils down to the starting point of an inanely cliche script. O’Dessa feels like the bastardized version of what you would get by placing Streets of Fire, Repo: The Genetic Opera, The Hunger Games, and American Idol into a blender. And as a major fan of Streets of Fire, I found the results here ridiculous.

Disney / Searchlight Pictures © 2024

Performance wise we get a mixed bag. Sink is fine as O’Dessa despite the litany of cliches she’s forced to spew. It’s an earnest and committed performance that sadly isn’t allowed to elevate the film as the staging and dialogue work in tandem to drag her down. It’s also not helping that she spends a good chunk of her time on screen opposite Harrison Jr., who delivers a performance that screams to be in a better movie. Harrison Jr. obliterates everyone else on screen here. And it feels that writer/ director Jasper feels more in love with this creation than the rest, giving him more opportunity to show off.

The showoff role though should have been Regina Hall’s. With an insane haircut and literally electrified brass knuckles, Hall’s Neon Dion should have been a standout. But she’s given nothing really to do here and her performance feels bottled up instead of the widely over-the-top it should/could have been. On the opposite side of that dice though, Bartlett’s Plutonovich needed some form of direction. A wildly uneven mess, Plutonovich comes off as a bootleg version of The Hunger Games‘ Caesar Flickerman crossed with 90’s pop pitchman Max Headroom, all under the all too familiar trope of the wizard behind the curtain from The Wizard of Oz. I’m not even sure you can blame Bartlett here as half the time he’s on camera you can almost see an expression that says ‘This is what you want right?’.

What it does get right here though is a great setting, the set design here is top notch along with some decent CGI work considering the film’s budget. The songs are mostly catchy too, though it does feel like the songs came first and then Gasper wrapped the story around them. O’Dessa in the end is a big swing and a miss, but despite its over-familiarity and cliches, it’s still quite an achievement that a film this bizarre would even have this level of polish nowadays. And while O’Dessa may not have worked, part of me still very much admires Geremy Jasper for stepping up and taking the swing.