by Sara Michelle Fetters - SGN A&E Writer

ROCK OF AGES
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I'm not sure what one exactly expects when they walk into a theatre to see Rock of Ages. The movie is based on a popular Broadway musical, itself inspired by late 1970s and early 1980s hard-rock anthems belted out with overly exuberant gusto by the likes of Def Leppard, Journey, Warrant, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, and Guns 'n' Roses. As for the story, it revolves around a young woman from the Midwest with stars in her eyes who comes to Los Angeles to make it big and ends up falling in love with a scruffy-looking, yet totally sexy, bar-back who's looking to take Rock and Roll by storm. In other words, high art this ain't, and anyone expecting it to be should probably have their head examined.

Taken on those terms, director Adam Shankman (Hairspray), along with screenwriters Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder) and Allan Loeb (Just Go With It), have arguably taken author Chris D'Arienzo's Broadway concept about as far as they could have. The film is as cheesy as they come (with a soundtrack littered with songs like 'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' 'We Built This City,' 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn,' and 'More Than Words,' how could it not be?), filled to the brim with an excess of style bordering on obnoxious, all delivered with a confidence and bravado that fits the material, and the songs that inspired it, perfectly.

This isn't exactly a compliment, of course. One wonders what might have happened had someone decided to take things a bit more seriously and infuse the project with some actual wit, weight, emotion, and pathos. You get the feeling that as simplistic as all this is, as threadbare and as overly melodramatic as it purposefully becomes (most of it plays like, of all things, an old Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach-party musical), there's actually some depth and honest human feeling lying at the bottom of this sugary sweet barrel of syrup. Problem is, no one seems interested in trying to uncover it.

Almost no one, that is. Rising above the fray - and proving he is one of the few honest-to-goodness, top-of-the-line Hollywood movie stars still working today - is Tom Cruise. Playing the film's central lonely, obsessive-compulsive, sexually provocative rock god, his Stacee Jaxx is a titanic figure of pure smoldering unadulterated bravado. The guy leaps off the screen, oozing a pure sensuality and bathos that's deeper and more resonant than anything else the picture offers. Channeling his most iconic performances (most notably Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, and Top Gun) as well as what many imagine to be his true personality as formed by three decades in the public spotlight, Cruise is a force of nature. The guy wills the movie to become more than the sum of its parts, and forces it to break free of the constraints cemented upon it by its hackneyed plot - making the long stretches he's absent all the more unbearable.

This isn't to say the other stars - Alec Baldwin, Malin Akerman, Russell Brand, and Catherine Zeta-Jones (who appears to be having a total blast, her church-set rendition of 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot' an almost instant classic), or the two central starlets, Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta - are bad. All of them (even Hough, whom I took to task for her lackluster performance in last year's Footloose remake), are just fine, each delivering what is required of them and doing their best to keep the movie on the shallow track Shankman has laid for them to follow.

And that's fine, I guess, as I seriously doubt few will feel let down by the film or disappointed in what it offers them. While stylistically I would have made some different choices (not the least of which is the inclusion of a certain Journey classic that, while part of the original Broadway production, has since been usurped and upstaged by Glee), it's hard to dispute that Shankman does know his stuff in regards to both the genre and the material. The movie can be a lot of fun, the music cues in particular so cheekily spectacular I myself giggled at least a half-dozen times throughout the picture's two-hour running time.

But when you look at Cruise, when you see what he decides to bring to this 'Nothin' But a Good Time' party, when you find yourself awestruck by his ability to mine places and corners of the human condition the rest of the picture seemingly has no interest in, you quickly realize Rock of Ages could have been so much more than it is. The movie didn't rock me like a hurricane, it didn't keep me believing, and walking out of the theater all I could do was harden my heart to the fact that I couldn't fight the feeling that these shadows of a Hard Rock night were nowhere near as close to heavenly as they could have been.

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