Rock of Ages (2012)

After directing the hit 2007 musical "Hairspray", I had relatively high hopes for Adam Shankman's newest venture into the movie musical genre. O, how quickly those hopes were dashed. The rock musical from which this is based never should have been brought to the stage--let alone to the big screen--but there you have it in all of its never ending, boring cheesiness.

The central premise hardly needs to be told, but I'll do it anyway (though why I would give more of my time to it is beyond me). An apple pie beauty with big dreams moves to Hollywood to become a big singer, carrying nothing with her but $17 and a suitcase of classic rock records. After being mugged she immediately bumps into a starry-eyed rock singer with as much ambition as she has who gets her a job at a debaucherous rock club. The two fall in love, quarrel over a misunderstanding and are reunited in the end, all under the glamour of the Hollywood sign.

Other characters float in and out, seemingly with purpose but ultimately pointless. Their usefulness seems simply to fill a plot that will allow 80's rock gems to be used for their disappointingly dull ends. The central issue with this film, and with the play for that matter, is simply the premise. A film like "Rock of Ages" which purports the power of rock to keep people young forever by sticking it to the man is automatically flawed by using covers of the greatest rock bands of all time.

See if you follow me...
Rock n' roll is about sex, drugs and all of the negative effects of love and loss. It is hate-filled, aggressive and full of passion. Some of them may be anthems, but those that play and sing those songs sing from emotional places. They wrote the songs after all. When these songs are taken out of context and used for the purpose of structuring a narrative around them they become bastardized and the songs lose their meaning. The actors filling the screen are not singing those songs because they mean something to them, they simply do it because the songs have been forced into the script like a square peg in a round hole. It is the actors' job to tease something coherent out of this mash up and make it emotionally resonant with a crowd, but with no vested interest in what those songs are really about and, in most cases, with voices that have no sort of emotional resonance themselves the songs simply fall flat. From there the plot suffers.

Further, it seems counter-intuitive to me to put rock onto a stage and further work that into a film. With a film like Pink Floyd: The Wall the music works because the plot helps it symbiotically, not to mention it stars the song-writer. It becomes a rock film in its core. With this movie, however, there are people starring who sound very much like theatre actors who are trained for the stage. That slick sound takes away any and all of the power which made the songs they are singing so great in the first place and makes them bland and lifeless. The last thing you want in a film called "Rock of Ages" is for it to be called "bland".

It is troubling to me that so many respectable actors like Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bryan Cranston and Alec Baldwin were roped into something like this. Their plots were usually uninteresting or made no sort of headway in the script at all. Zeta-Jones plays a bible-thumping wife of the mayor who is out to clean the streets of the city and purge it of all of the riotous youth. This seems to be the only sort of antagonism to the mischievous rockers, but one look at the rock god known as Stacey Jaxx and she swoons where she stands. There again is the unbeatable restorative power of angry music and bad hair.

Tom Cruise almost single-handedly earns this film a good score playing said rock god. He swaggers in, half naked and permafried, donned in furs with a baboon that mixes drinks for him and causes women to faint with the slightest glance. Cruise fills this roll with every fiber of his being and it is hilarious. He speaks in whispers, squints into your soul, but when he rocks he rocks hard. Cruise's voice is actually quite good too. He takes the mick out of himself to be sure, but it is only when we watch him that we see what this film could have been. Had the rest of the cast been half as talented or half as committed this could have been a very good, if mildly forgettable, film. Instead, despite the entertaining and well done choreography and production, this is a rather unwatchable attempt at being "hardcore".

1.5/4