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75Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist.
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75As a means of non-participatory time travel and non-intellectual stimulation, it's successful. Toe-tapping and eye-rolling are equally forgivable. Rock on.
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75The hugely enjoyable Rock of Ages is saved by its music, a tasty brew drawn from Def Leppard, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison and Whitesnake. It's near impossible not to rock along.
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75The only problem is that the plot meanders when nobody is singing. If you're making the kind of movie where everybody in the audience knows for sure what's going to happen, it's best not to linger on the recycled bits.
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70Blessed with unstoppable energy, an undeniably bawdy sense of fun and Tom Cruise in backless leather pants, it takes songs you may never have loved and turns them into a musical that's easy to enjoy.
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70Seeing Tom Cruise swathed in leather pants and fake tattoos, as Axl Rose-style metal god Stacee Jaxx, is supposedly Rock of Ages' big draw. But the movie is much more fun when he's not around.
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70The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.
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70Rock of Ages is an effulgent celebration of fakeness. It isn't trying to be real; it's trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.
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70Blending a perfect brew of classic '80s songs, big laughs and rockin' performances, director Adam Shankman manages to make this film adaptation of the hit Broadway jukebox musical a red hot summer blast for people who grew up with glam metal - or just can't escape it on the radio.
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67Rock of Ages is nothing but a good time and sometimes less, slogging through the knee-deep hoopla of 1980s nostalgia at a jukebox pace.
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63A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next.
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63When Rock of Ages remembers it's supposed to be a cartoon, it's a noisy, sweaty, giddy ball of fun. When it suddenly develops a conscience or tries to process a thought deeper than "I love rock 'n' roll," it trips over its own feet.
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63The movie has its cheesy pleasures, and some of them are even intended. I'm just not sure whether Tom Cruise's impersonation of Axl Rose is one of them.
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60Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.
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60Rock of Ages is an experience that will alternately leave you embarrassed and amused.
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60Like every one of its songs, it makes a lot of noise about nothing much and cockily straddles awfulness and greatness. It's enormously entertaining nonsense.
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Jun 13, 201260Disposable, overly long fun best enjoyed with BFFs and a bevvie.
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60Fans of Moulin Rouge–esque repurposing will be in hog heaven. Everyone else will want to hop that midnight train going anywhere pronto.
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50Why, as a patron of Rock of Ages, do I wish I had taken the precaution of entering the theater drunk? [25 June 2012, p.84]
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50Where this PG-rated adaptation of a hit Broadway show, adapted by Adam Shankman falls down is by being far too mild for its supposedly outrageous subject.
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50It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.
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50The only edge in the movie is represented by Russell Brand, who actually lived the lifestyle, but he's muzzled by a bad Liverpool accent and a gay subplot that's as insincere as the swaggering anthems by fatuous hacks like Foreigner, Starship and Journey.
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50Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie.
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50The movie, full of talented performers in search of a more propulsive vehicle, settles for workmanlike cover-band status, which makes this a cover-band tribute to a jukebox musical - a long way from true, trashy exhilaration.
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50Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it.
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50Shankman gets enormously entertaining performances from Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin, so much so that it's a problem: The movie's not about them.
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50Absent the infectious live-audience energy of Chris D'Arienzo's legit hit, this affectionate glam-rock-a-thon reps a visually bland staging of frankly insipid material, never tapping into the raucous, go-for-broke energy that would spin the show's cliches into gold, let alone platinum.
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40Unfortunately, like the Poison song says -- and, in many ways, like the decade itself -- it ain't nothin' but a good time.
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40What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx.
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Jun 10, 201240He (Shankman) succeeds in draining most of the fun from a vehicle that was all about the winking humor of its flagrant cheesiness.
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38Shankman's staging of the numbers - especially the leaden choreography and hackneyed locations such as the Hollywood sign - was far sloppier and less creative than for his last musical, the vastly superior "Hairspray."
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38Don't stop believing. Just avoid clichéd musicals that try to capture the anarchic spirit of rock with trite commercial re-treads.
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38Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.
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33This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.
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30Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap.
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30Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful.
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30Creating plot from lyrics, in this case, leads to heavy-handed literalism and limited creativity. The wall of music is amusing for a while, but grows into a loud, wearying assault long before the movie's two hours are up.
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30A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded.
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25Oddly tone deaf.
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20Doubtless, like The Producers, it will be adapted back into the theatre, some time in 2017, at which time it will be even more bland and tiring.
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12If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.
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0I haven't seen a movie this bad since "Battlefield Earth" and "Howard the Duck."