REVIEW: ‘Emilia Perez’ is an awful, misguided Netflix entry

Wow, we got two crime drama musicals in 2024, and the one with the comic book clown was better.

Zoe Saldaña stars in “Emilia Perez” as Rita, a lawyer working for a defense attorney firm who’s unsatisfied with her career. After a recent major case, she gets a call from Juan Del Monte, the head of a cartel who is seeking her assistance. The kingpin is seeking to transition and wants gender-affirming care, before starting a new life and faking her death.

The path to becoming who she wants to be, Emilia Perez (Karla Sofia Gascon), is one Rita decides to help manage and plot in return for a big payout. But even once everything is set up, the future remains complicated for the two characters.

As the first song began in “Emilia Perez,” I began wondering if I was being pranked, and it’s a feeling that was easy to keep through the entire movie. It’s astonishing how much of a disaster this film ends up being. It’s a movie trying so hard to explore the trans experience and the cartel violence in Mexico, all while being a musical, and it spectacularly fails.

French director Jacques Audiard, who also writes, certainly swings for the fences, and that’s something to appreciate. But the creative decisions are consistently poor. Perhaps there’s no bigger example than the musical portions.

The songs feel so detached from the movie. They try to advance the story and reveal more about the characters, which is good. But each one feels entirely inauthentic, often missing the tone of the scene, lacking in real emotion and really void of personality.

Even the set-pieces for many of the musical moments are dull with not much memorable choreography. It doesn’t help that the lyrics are often terrible. There’s an especially cringe-worthy one where Rita is meeting with a doctor about the aforementioned gender-affirming care.

The musical moments in a musical should be some of its strongest selling points. They should be the things that carry such a movie and pack a punch for the audience. That’s not the case here. It feels more like Audiard wanted to experiment by adding a musical element to the flick, rather than being driven by passion.

Maybe one could overlook the poor music scenes, though, if a better, well-plotted story was featured. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, either. One already has to suspend their disbelief with the movie when it comes to a cartel kingpin looking to go through this elaborate scheme, but the way things play out makes it even worse.

Emilia’s journey, and Rita’s since she’s basically along for the ride, pretty much turns into nothing but a soap opera-level melodrama involving a woman named Jessi (Selena Gomez). Once the wife of the cartel lord, Jessi believes she is nothing but a widow to Juan, but her and her kids are called to live with Emilia who is pretending to be the former kingpin’s cousin.

It’s so odd that this film is being highlighted for its inclusion of a lead trans character, and that role being filled by a trans woman herself, because it really doesn’t entirely feel like it’s about Emilia’s journey as a trans person. The film picks up with her years after her transition, so the audience doesn’t get to see how she adjusted to her life.

Instead, it’s mostly about Emilia trying to recoup her family, which leads to the aforementioned melodrama. It should be noted that the film also dedicates a portion of its runtime to Emilia starting a non-profit to help find the bodies of cartel victims.

This portion feels under-developed, though. Rather than become a central piece of Emilia’s character arc as she tries to atone for likely too many deaths that she can actually atone for, it has a “tacked on” vibe.  Rita as a character gets lost here, too. She kind of just follows Emilia without a path of her own and doesn’t call out Emilia’s impossible task of “setting things right” with the non-profit.

The acting isn’t all that impressive, either. Gascón, to her credit, portrays her character both pre- and post-transition, and does give Emilia a notable personality. However, she also rarely has moments that drive home the magnitude of her past actions or her current struggle.

Saldaña, meanwhile is fine, with a couple really good moments, but not award worthy. Then there’s Gomez, who is disappointingly forgettable. Both actresses have, in all honesty, done a lot better work.

“Emilia Perez” doesn’t work as a musical, crime thriller or even a drama about the trans experience. It fails on everything it sets out to do. The emotion is never convincing, the story is never captivating, in fact it becomes laughable, and the music is detrimental to the experience. 1 out of 5.