Review: Rock Of Ages

Despite its star-studded cast, Rock Of Ages can't hold a candle (or should that be a lighter?) to the Broadway and West End musical from which this has been remade.

Where the movie mostly disappoints is in the performances from Tom Cruise and Russell Brand, two castings that looked ingenious on paper but turn out to be massive letdowns. Cruise bizarrely plays rocker Stacie Jaxx as a drug-damaged mumbling mystic instead of the cross between Les Grossman and Axl Rose we all hoped for, severely cutting down on laughs as a result. Brand should be able to play this kind of role in his sleep, but decides to adopt a bad Brummie accent and drop most of the shtick that made his turns as Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek so entertaining.

In fact the whole film seems to take its self to seriously, where the stage version embraced the cheesy nature of musicals and 80s cock rock, the films script lack of humour and dearth of any actual jokes throughout makes you think the producers have mistook what made Rock of Ages entertaining in the first place, making the love story more prominent when the fact that the plot was a bit rubbish was a joke to be mocked not maintained.