Grab the nachos and pass the guacamole, it’s time for the cheese-fest of the year. Based on the stage musical, Andrew Shankman’s Rock of Ages requires absolute submission; a realisation that cynicism and low energy are not welcome here. For this bouffant-haired, unabashedly earnest ‘80s-set musical is all cringey style, cheesy songs, no substance – and damn proud of it.
When small town girl (‘livin’ in a lonely worrrrrld’) Sherrie (Julianne Hough) moves to Hollywood, she takes a job in the once-legendary Bourbon Room, run by leather-clad duo Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand. Under threat from conservative mayor’s wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, the club’s revival depends on convincing eccentric rock star Stacee Jaxx to perform.
It’s incredibly simple, deliriously over the top and – for cinemusical fans – tremendously good fun. The soundtrack, featuring classics like ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’, ‘We Built This City’, ‘Any Way You Want It’, and a liberal dose of Journey, is a goldmine of nostalgia and guilty pleasures, performed with gusto and a huge amount of good humour. The entire cast (apart from Footloose’s Hough, who remains dead behind the eyes on her high-profile journey to the middle) throw themselves into the awful ‘80s outfits and air-punching choreography, celebrating a rock-loving time when being in a boy band was far more shameful than being a stripper.
But no-one gives it more than Tom Cruise, whose hilarious, assless chaps-wearing, breast-signing, monkey-sidekicked Stacee is a bizarre, stoned, womanising mix of Axl Rose and Keith Richards, and sees the actor play deliciously and hilariously against type.
However, Every Rose Has Its Thorn (yeah I went there). Overlong and betraying its theatrical roots, in-between songs the story is often very clumsily handled, while the flaccid romance between vanilla stage-school kids Diego Boneta and Hough is thoroughly unengaging.
But even they can’t ruin the mood of this rip-roaring rock revelry. Rock out, sing along, and worry about your rep later.