Rock of Ages Review

I have friends who have told me several times to watch Rock of Ages, but I never got around to it. I got lucky and caught it on TV the other night after Mamma Mia! It must have been jukebox movie musical night or something. The fact that Rock of Ages is a jukebox musical actually had me worried. Prior to watching, I hadn’t watched any trailers and I had no idea what the plot was about. The most important thing about jukebox musicals is making sure that the existing songs actually tie in with the plot of the musical. I think Mamma Mia! does this extremely well, but this probably works so well because the entire musical is just ABBA songs. You can often tie a theme between songs done by the same artist, so it would be much easier to write a plot for that. This is what hurts Rock of Ages. The songs are fun, the way they incorporate the songs is fun, but I don’t feel like the songs move the plot along. For the majority of the movie, I didn’t feel like I was watching these characters singing these songs, I felt like I was watching a bunch of people doing karaoke in different locations. That’s the problem with doing a jukebox musical that involves a bunch of different songs from a bunch of different artists. It’s very hard to get everything to tie together in a way that makes sense.

I really enjoyed the relationship between Sherrie and Drew. I was totally invested very early on and I thought they had great chemistry. Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, and Tom Cruise all made me feel a level of discomfort, I’m not going to lie. It was also super obvious that they were getting some serious help and tweaks to their vocals. Some of the songs in this movie sounded very auto tuned and overdone, but I think that just added to the campiness of it all. I really enjoyed the protest scene with the mashup of We Built This City and We’re Not Gonna Take It. I thought these songs blended together very well and I thought this scene was also done very well.

I had the biggest problem with Catherine Zeta-Jones for almost the whole movie. I don’t have any issue with her or her performance, she’s amazing. It’s just her character. It was so hard to see her as this goody-two-shoes type. When I hear that voice of hers, I hear Velma Kelly from Chicago. I was just waiting for that bad girl to come out to match her sultry voice. I thought she was the standout performance.