'Rock of Ages' presents boring mess of a musical

With pleasant surprises and disappointments abound throughout the season, "Rock of Ages" is the first movie of the summer and quite possibly the year that I had no set expectations for whatsoever.  I wouldn't quite say that its previews looked terrible but there was something about Tom Cruise playing a hard rocker in a musical bloated with overexposed 80s rock music that just never blipped on my radar. The revelation from my friends that the film is based on a rather successful stage musical helped me to abate my gut instinct warning me of any negative qualities that the film would have, allowing me to judge the film as the laughably awful production that it is regardless of my feelings towards the previews.

Cruise plays the aforementioned fictitious 80s rock icon Stacee Jaxx, who serves as the idol for aspiring musicians Sherrie and Drew -played by Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta respectively- who work at The Bourbon Room, a bar on the Los Angeles Sunset Strip, which has come under fire for moral corruption by the religious conservatives of the local church, led by Patricia Whitmore -played by Catherine Zeta-Jones- who wants to close the bar down. When Drew gets his big break from Jaxx's agent -played by Paul Giamatti- however, his relationship with her takes a turn for the worst as he grapples with the prices of fame. Meanwhile, Jaxx deals with his own ego and how much fame has changed him.

That synopsis is one of the hardest things that I have had to compile in recent history because the story's actual unfolding onscreen is a mess. Hough and Boneta do a decent enough acting job but they unfortunately have almost nothing to work with. They are the center that the film is built around, yet not only are they given little material to work with but the story surrounding them is incredibly thin and reliant on the lack of communication typically found in Hollywood romance. Their stake in the story is the focus of the film but the lack of material makes a great majority of the film drag.

The chemistry amongst the more triple A members of the ensemble cast offers the few genuinely enjoyable moments of the film. Russell Brand's chemistry with Alec Baldwin as the owners of The Bourbon Room was so fantastic and fun to watch that it honestly made me forget that I ordinarily can't stand Russell Brand. Mary J. Blige steals the scenes for the five minutes that she shows up and Tom Cruise consistently left the screen with me demanding more of him. Even Catherine Zeta-Jones, despite practically playing a cartoon character and lacking any real story arc, gets a few decent moments despite having one of the worst musical numbers of the movie.

Unfortunately, the poor pacing and nonexistent ending drag down any performance that the cast could have pulled off and draws attention to just to the film's most crippling flaw. The music of "Rock of Ages" is horrendously selected and utilized.

The soundtrack is generally composed of the most overexposed hard rock and hair metal of the 80s. Most of the songs used have been played to death or mocked by the modern day and others more are songs that are trying to be forgotten. I love a lot of music of the 80 and enjoy some of the songs in this film but irritation settled in quickly after hearing "Don't Stop Believin'" for the umpteenth time. The entire film feels like a rejected episode of "Glee."

It doesn't help that the movie doesn't know whether or not it wants the cast to actually exercise some sort of vocal talent or not, as the songs alternate between being sung by the cast like embarrassing karaoke or sung with the vocal track overlaid and lowered in volume. The performances in this film are like awkwardly catching somebody singing that clearly believed they were in the privacy of their own company. The covers of the songs themselves are not only bland but crowbarred into the story completely nonsensically.

Between cringing and squirming in my chair at the film's awkward craftsmanship and yawning at the nearly two hour length, I almost want to commend "Rock of Ages" for being a memorable kind of bad. I don't exactly hate it on the level of, say "Battleship," but it is the first film I've seen this year that has instilled within me a pavlovian reaction of fear and disgust at the sheer image of its presence so strong that I will fight tooth and nail to escape the room in which it is being played should I ever be in it.

D