Cruise just has to remove his sunglasses to create a wave of excitement. His duet with Malin Akerman’s rock journalist is what you want the rest of the film to be – funny, sexually charged, and, like a perfect song, leaving you wanting more. When he’s on, he gives Rock Of Ages a Spinal Tap-style push over the edge, a frisson that you wish could carry over to the rest of the film.
Thank God, then, for Cruise as rock God Stacee Jaxx. Rock Of Ages teases us with a scattering of little moments – a nicely judged montage flashback breaks up one routine, Cruise offering up a crossword answer another – but they’re only brief moments of invention. In an ideal world, that’s the point of making a film from a musical, surely? You can make big moments from the little things you can’t do on stage.
Rock Of Ages uses them to fill the running time.Īnd Shankman shoots everything up close and personal, as if he’s trying to give you the best seat at the musical where you can read exactly what’s on everyone’s face. Whedon used song and dance interludes as character revelations. Among his many gigs was choreographing Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, and you kind of wish he’d paid more attention then to Joss Whedon (it’s too late now after The Avengers everyone will be doing it). Shankman is a choreographer-turned-director who’s a better choreographer than he is a director. But Rock Of Ages works in reverse – it creates a set of characters and a workmanlike story to service the songs, when what you really want is songs to tell a story. It’s like an action film that moves from one shoot-out to the next great in theory, and great in practice if you have a story to justify it, or the style to pull it off. Rock Of Ages is so in thrall to including every memorable rock ballad that it barely pauses for breath between each one. And they give him lots of musical set pieces. They give him plenty of melodrama – in the form of a bland romance between said small town girl (Julianne Hough’s Sherrie Christian) and Diego Boneta’s rock-star-wannabe Drew Boley – yet very little laughs. Before we can wonder how seriously to take this, coach passengers burst sporadically into song, and it seems like the film is telling us: not very seriously please. Most of the time it wants to be very serious about how great 80s rock music is, like an over-eager fan shouting in your ear: ‘Isn’t this song great? Isn’t other music rubbish?’ It’s frustrating, because when it’s in on the joke, the film becomes what you want it to be: a celebration of what was so great about the 80s, undercut with how ridiculous it all looks now.Ĭase in point: Rock Of Ages opens with its heroine sitting on a bus to Hollywood, pulling out a childhood photo, reading a heart-felt message on the back about following her dream, and then nodding reassuringly to herself. The thing is, RoboCop’s writer Ed Neumeier was joking, ridiculing the excess of that decade while revelling in it (a high-wire act that few films have walked so well). marketing team might want to steal that car’s tag line: big is most definitely back. It’s like RoboCop’s 6000 SUX car, a supped-up, high-performing behemoth. Fittingly for a film that celebrates the 80s, Rock Of Ages feels like a product of that decade’s most bombastic and pitch-perfect film, RoboCop, something Paul Verhoeven might have included in those faux adverts sandwiched between bouts of violence and Jesus parallels. Subtlety, you may have guessed already, doesn’t live here. Big hair, big music, big costumes, big stars. You only need one word to sum up the appeal of Rock Of Ages – big.