Dead End Drive-In: Now Showing – Rock Of Ages
Written by Mark Ashby
Sunday, 17 June 2012 04:00
Rock Of Ages (2012 Warner Bros/New Line Cinema)
Trips to the cinema in the Ashby household normally involve taking the beloved four-year old grand-daughter to see the latest Disney epic, filling her full of sugary sweets and drinks, then hitting the KFC before returning her to her mother just at the point where she’s fit to vomit… I mean, what sort of sad, miserable old bastard voluntarily goes to sit in a darkened room and watch a bunch of twats prance about on a giant movie screen – especially when they could be in the pub across the street getting happily smashed?
Well, on this particular occasion, this sad, miserable old so-and-so, as – purely in the name of journalism, you understand – has ventured forth from said licensed premises (where, indeed, a bunch of twats were prancing about on a giant screen, chasing a harmless round leather object) to sit in a darkened room to watch the latest ‘must-see’ rock musical spectacular!
My expectations were not high, I must admit, and I knew it was going to be bad… but, little did I expect it to be so feckin’ awful and an experience more painful than having a wisdom tooth extracted without the aid of anaesthetic!
Apart from myself, there appears to be one other aging rocker in the ‘crowd’ of about 18 people who have rushed to this prime-time Thursday evening screening – although a group of giggling, tracksuit-clad Glee moms do wander in as the adverts start to roll, at which point it’s time to crack open the JD, dive into the popcorn and settle back to endure the pain…
It gets off to an extremely bad start with a, thankfully curtailed, mauling of ‘Paradise City’, which segues into the sort of singalong that is a trademark of the likes of ‘Fame’ – and immediately throws up the first historical inaccuracy: although set in late 1987 (after the release of Aerosmith’s ‘Permanent Vacation’, as our suitably doe-eyed blonde heroine has a copy of said album on her lap during her bus trip from Oklahoma to LA to find fame and fortune – yes, it’s that old corny storyline!), this segment finishes with Poison’s ‘Nothing But a Goo
d Time’, which, as any self-respecting rock fan knows, wasn’t released until nearly a full year later. I know, it’s supposed to a ‘homage’ to the ’80s, but at least get your sequencing right! Again, in an early scene set in Tower Records, the store is heavily promoting Maiden’s ‘Somewhere In Time’: would they still have their store covered in giant posters for an album released nearly 12 months earlier?
All right, maybe I’m being picky… and I do have to admit that there are some good moments in the 90-plus minutes: Alec Baldwin manages to show some of his charisma in an otherwise workmanlike performance as the owner of The Bourbon Room (er, what?) and Russell Brand’s all too brief appearances are typically camp and over-the-top with some witty one liners (which he probably wrote himself given the rest of the atrocious script); there is a pretty decent version of ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ at about the 45 minute mark, and the subsequent back stage scenes are actually quite well done in their portrayal of the rock star image versus real person contradiction (before descending into a stereotypical sex scene) – and Tom Cruise’s performance of ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ (and we’ve no reason to doubt that the reasonably OK vocal tracks are indeed his own) pisses all over the Leppard original!
But, these are a few gems in the midst of an ocean of dross. By and large the performances – including that of Cruise (who should stick to jumping out of 50th floor windows without the aid of a safety harness – please!) – are wooden and lacking credibility, and the songs are destroyed: Catherine Zeta Jones’s rendition of ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ – performed in a church to a ‘Thriller’-esque dance routine with a bunch of zombie mums – would be hilarious if it wasn’t so laughable (although Mary J Blige does some more than passable Benatar covers later on).
Everything about the movie is so squeaky clean as to make it totally sanitized and at best it is a piece of cheap, clichéd Hollywood B movie crap – check out the seduction scene at the Hollywood sign, in which our butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth heroine asks our similarly blue-eyed hero, who just happens to have a guitar with him, to “sing me a song,” to which he responds with “this is one I’ve been writing since I met you” (like, er, two minutes ago): and, guess what the song is? Okay, I’ll ruin it for you… it begins “She’s just a small town girl…” Told you it was clichéd.
The totally vomit-inducing versions of ‘Any Way You Want It’ and ‘Every Rose Has It’s Thorn’ basically sum this movie up, as one to be avoided like the plague by all real lovers of rock music. Me? I’m sticking to the Disney shit…
