Rock of Ages (2012)

The new hair-metal musical Rock of Ages is one of those movies that lets you know exactly what you’re in for from the beginning, as one of the first things we witness is small town gal Julianne Hough on a bus heading for Los Angeles. She has dreams of becoming one of the most famous singers in the world, and the piano intro to Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” kicks in. We know two things: 1) the movie is doing itself no favors by immediately reminding the audience that they could be watching Boogie Nights, and 2) that the name of Hough’s character must be Christian. It turns out it’s her surname, and we watch as she, along with the rest of her fellow bus riders, serenades the audience with one of the most popular power ballads of the ’80s. It’s cheesy, rather klunky, and relies heavily on the audience’s love for this particular brand of music. Despite some moments of inspired goofiness, this applies to just about every scene in Rock of Ages.

The film then reveals that it is actually quite the ensemble piece; juggling the stories of about a dozen characters and giving almost none of them the time required to make them interesting. The closest thing the film has to an A-story is the romance between Hough and wannabe rock star Diego Boneta. Both want to make it big in the world of rock-n-roll, but their low-paying jobs at rock club The Bourbon Room keep them down. The club is owned by Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin) and managed by his very close friend Lonny (Russell Brand), and they spend most of the film quipping at each other. The raunchy atmosphere of The Bourbon Room is often protested by Patricia Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones), wife of new Los Angeles mayor Mike Whitmore (Bryan Cranston). The only thing that can save the club is superstar Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise), the lead singer of the rock band Arsenal. He goes through most of his days drunk, half-dressed, and surrounded by similarly half-dressed women, but an encounter with Rolling Stone writer Constance Sack (Malin Åkerman) causes him to question his lifestyle.

Some of these characters are more interesting than others, but Rock of Ages grinds to a screeching halt whenever Hough and Boneta share the screen. I liked Hough in Footloose and I’m mostly unfamiliar with Boneta, but emotional, dialogue-based acting is not a strong suit for either of these performers. They both assert themselves quite well in the dance numbers, but whenever they’re supposed to talk to each other like human beings they have all the chemistry of ketchup and a golf club. This relationship also clashes with the silly tone found throughout the rest of the film. All the other characters are strange, colorful, quirky and ultimately far more interesting than the plain-old lovebirds at the film’s center. This is something you may be able to get away with in a live musical, but director Adam Shankman plays it in such sincere, down-the-middle fashion that every second we spend focusing on them is downright maddening.

As a result, the 123-minute running time is both way too much and way too little. The second act in particular is just about endless, as Hough and Boneta deal with their unfortunate situations through a series of musical numbers and scenes of moping. Meanwhile, every other storyline only gets enough time to lay out the broad strokes and nothing more. The conflict between Zeta-Jones and The Bourbon Room never reaches an actual boiling point—at no time does she share the screen with Baldwin, the club’s owner—and her character spends the entirely of her screen time on the outside looking in. Even more wasteful is Cranston’s brief stint as her husband. All he does is watch his wife’s escapades on television while getting spanked by a secretary he’s having an affair with or something. It’s not the most dignified role, is what I’m saying. And he never even gets to sing!

The best (and by extension, funniest) scenes in the movie belong to just about everyone else. Most of the Rock of Ages press attention went to Cruise’s stint as Stacee Jaxx, and the result is a hilarious, surprisingly subdued performance. Tom Cruise having fun is the best kind of Tom Cruise, and that is certainly the case here. His singing is unremarkable but fine—even then, my guess is that there were some alterations done—but whenever he’s onscreen the film takes a turn for the better just because it also takes a turn for the weirder. The first time we see Stacee, his pet monkey Hey Man is shooting off a gun for no particular reason. If Rock of Ages indulged its randomly strange side a little bit more—which I’m assuming comes courtesy of co-screenwriter Justin Theroux, who wrote the great Tropic Thunder—it might have been more successful.

By now you’re probably wondering what I thought of the musical numbers, which are ultimately the main attraction in Rock of Ages. The answer? Inconsistent, just like everything else. I like a good movie musical as much as the next guy, but for me to get into a song-and-dance number it has to either advance the plot in some way or provide a substantive character moment. If a song is just biding time, I’ll probably be disinterested. That’s part of the great challenge that Rock of Ages faces; these aren’t original songs, so it’s going to be real tough to make the performances feel earned. Their solution is to mash several songs up into a single number, and those can be both fun and awkward. The film starts off on the right note with a cool combination of “Just Like Paradise” and “Nothin’ But a Good Time,” but others just don’t click.

There’s also the issue that much of the music featured in Rock of Ages doesn’t mean a whole lot to me or the rest of my generation. Some of these songs are unimpeachably great—others are unimpeachably bad—but at times it’s confusing what precise demographic the film is going for. The music obviously skews older, but Shankman’s slick direction and some of the cast would suggest that the film wants the broadest possible audience. The final product ultimately falls victim to the old adage that if you want to please everyone, you’ll wind up pleasing no one. It’s got some the pieces that would make up a great, over-the-top’80s hair metal musical, but they’re ultimately cobbled together into a mostly shapeless heap.

 Grade: C