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Rock of Ages (12A)
© Unknown - all rights reserved |
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| Tookey's Rating |
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4
/10 |
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| Average Rating |
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5.00
/10 |
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| Starring |
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Julianne Hough, Russell Brand, Catherine Zeta-Jones
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| Full Cast > |
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Directed by:
Adam Shankman
Written by:
Justin Theroux, Chris D’Arienzo, Allan Loeb, based on the stage musical by D’Arienzo
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| Released: |
2012 |
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| Genre: |
MUSICAL
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Length: |
125 |
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Tacky and not terribly original. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Camper than a Russell Grant dance routine and cheesier than Gorgonzola soup, Rock of Ages is musical silliness for anyone who found Footloose too intellectual.
It’s crass when it should be comic and hasn’t an innovative thought in its head, but the stage version is already a hit, so clearly there is an audience for the world’s tackiest jukebox musical, built around heavy metal anthems that mostly sold better in the States than over here.
It tells the utterly hackneyed story - check out 42nd Street if you want to see it done properly - of a small-town girl with dreams of showbiz success. She’s Julianne Hough, who is a two-time winner of Dancing With The Stars and has the heavy metal street cred of sliced Wonderloaf. She arrives in 1987 Los Angeles and falls in love with a hunky barman who longs to be a singer-songwriter (Diego Boneta).
There’s a good chance he will fail, as the first song he composes for her is Don’t Stop Believin’, a hit for Journey way back in 1981. “I can’t believe you wrote that,” she has to gasp with a straight face.
Both work in a rock club run by ageing heavy metal fan Alec Baldwin (pictured left) and his British assistant - Russell Brand, with an accent that roams between Birmingham and Liverpool. Too bad that the moralising mayor of Los Angeles (Bryan Cranston) and his born-again Christian wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) want to close it down for being a Satanic influence on the young.
Yes, that’s right. We are asked to believe that the Religious Right ran LA in the Eighties, which will come as a surprise to most people. The real mayor at that time was Tom Bradley, a black Democrat noted for his liberalism.
Slightly more credible is the idea that Baldwin’s club is in trouble with the taxman. “Taxes are so un-rock’n’roll”, he complains. But he hopes his club is going to be saved by the last gig of the Arsenal, a heavy metal band fronted by an insane alcoholic egomaniac played, for maximum zaniness, by Tom Cruise (pictured right). But Cruise’s grasping, seedy manager (Paul Giamatti) has other ideas on where the profits should go.
Suspend any notions of real life, good music or taste, and this show has plenty of energy. Cruise’s miming leaves something to be desired and his gym-toned torso is absurdly wrong for a self-indulgent alcoholic, but he reveals an okay singing voice and unexpected skills as an electric guitarist. And there’s a memorably camp love duet between two of movieland’s most notorious heterosexuals.
If you’re in the mood for cheerful rubbish and suffer from a mysterious need to be deafened, you could do a lot worse. It reminded me most of the cult movie Coyote Ugly, another film that seriously proposes pole-dancing and casual sex with unappetising men as means of feminist empowerment.
Adam Shankman directs with the same raucous enthusiasm he brought to Hairspray, which remains his most entertaining work. Those cursed with long memories may recall that Shankman directed three of the worst comedies in history: Cheaper By The Dozen 2, The Pacifier and The Wedding Planner. Classy, he ain’t. Nor is his film. But some people might consider it a guilty pleasure.
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