Adam Shankman returns to the realm of musicals for the first time since 2007’s surprise gem Hairspray with Rock Of Ages, a hot-and-heavy, hairband tribute to the 80’s featuring a cast the likes of Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Alec Baldwin, Bryan Cranston and, erm, Eli Roth?
The story loosely follows a young girl, Julianne Hough, as she leaves her small town life to go to LA and become a star, in a town full of opportunists. When she finds LA not-so-great, out pops a young man, Diego Boneta, ready to lend a hand to an innocent, pretty blonde girl, and helps her get a job at hip joint The Bourbon Room. Their friendship becomes love, and their love inspires him to start to sing a song to her that he wrote. He’s writing Don’t Stop Believing. I’ll put an asterisk on this part for now. * See.
The film then throws additional plots and characters onto this light, breezy romance in the effort to make a stronger impact on songs, so the guys who run the Bourbon Room, Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand, have money issues, and are being protested by Catherine Zeta-Jones’ mayors wife, who has a vendetta against performer Stacey Jaxx (Tom Cruise), who’s life is going down the bottle, until Rolling Stone journo Malin Akerman gives him a stern talking to. Stacey’s manager, Paul Giamatti, is taking all the money and keeping Stacey as low as possible, whilst hunting for new talent, which he finds in the Bourbon Room one fateful night. Cue opportunities to shoe-horn in songs like Wanted Dead Or Alive, Hit Me With Your Best Shot and I Want To Know What Love Is that barely, if at all, fit the scenes surrounding them, as is often the case with a jukebox musical, and don’t push any plot forward,because the lyrics bare no resemblance to things happening, since they were written decades prior. This is the key problem with Rock Of Ages, they choose good songs, sure, but the ability to fit them neatly into the stories, with the right characters, never really works. The closest moment is Anyway You Want It, sung by Mary J. Blige as she teaches Julianne Hough’s character about the possibilities in exotic dancing. Which is pretty bloody bleak for a fun, happy film like this.
As the songs hit, it’s evident that at least the cast is commendable. Cruise, Giamatti, Baldwin, all could have been the Pierce Brosnan of the film, but avoid that dramatically, and the leads, despite not having voices strong enough for rock, do more than fine musically. It’s just a shame that the songs are ill-fitting and often irrelevant to a scene in a detracting way. Then again, there’s an awful lot of tedium surrounding the dialogue scenes, in fact I think only Paul Giamatti avoids detracting from the film with his comic timing, as it seems the script can’t really chose what tone it’s aiming for, sometimes melodramatic, sometimes cheesy, sometimes low-brow, which seems to give license to Brand to whip his nips out, and tongue a microphone whilst debating if he should keep his bad Manchurian accent or not in each scene.
If he was confused, then so was everyone else as characters introduced late into the game are thrown away just as quickly, and smaller characters are given way too much screen-time and supposedly dramatic B-stories which take time away from our two leads, who spend way too much of the second half of our screen to be leads of the movie. As if a hyperactive kid was switching channels between MTV, VH1 and CNN.
It’s more of a shame since the opening scene seemed to get the tone and attitude right straight away. Julianne Hough on a bus to LA, starts softly singing the opening to Sister Christian, and slowly the whole bus joins in. But as soon as she gets to LA, the film loses that charm.
Ok, let’s grab that asterisk from up top now, * There it is. Can we put a stop to Don’t Stop Believing now? It becomes a running part of this film, and Glee already ruined the song so very bloody much. Yes, Journey’s song was ridiculously catchy, and possibly a classic, but it’s been done, way too often. There are better, stronger, more appropriate songs out there. And since the film was willing to take liberties from the stage show in characters, why not in removing that song? Ending something with that song is only fine if it suggests Tony Soprano may have been killed (And if you think that’s a spoiler, may I remind you you’ve had a half decade at least to catch up) but the joyousness from that song has now gone, and all it leaves us with is the sour taste of Ryan Murphy’s lame, pandering TV show.
Rock Of Ages is 30 minutes too long, and about 5 protagonists overblown, with musical numbers that, whilst well sung, are far too superfluous to the whole thing. Strong comedy from Paul Giamatti and intermittent moments from Cruise aside, the performances are solid but nothing more, and the lack of focus on the young romantic leads is really odd. It could have been fun and joyous, but with too much baggage and an over-blow duration, it stalls at the half-way mark, but skipping bits on the blu ray should lead to a more entertaining, much more abridged, film.
2/5
Oh, Reel Original 