For those who grew up in the 1980s on a diet of flamboyant and glamorous rock ‘n’ roll, the Sunset Strip in Hollywood was the Mecca for hair metal, where such Platinum acts as Van Halen, Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses first made a name for themselves. Aside from Penelope Spheeris’ 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years and a short sequence in 2005′s Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, the glam metal scene is largely overlooked by rock critics, often dismissing it as shallow and unworthy of recognition.
But since 2006 it has enjoyed something of a revival thanks to the hit Broadway musical Rock of Ages, which took its name from an early Def Leppard hit and portrayed the L.A. club scene of the late 1980s in the wake of the hair metal explosion. From a screenplay adapted by Chris D’Arienzo, Allan Loeb and Tropic Thunder‘s Justin Theroux, director Adam Shankman (Hairspray) has brought the story to the big screen with a cast that includes Russell Brand (who played a rock star in Get Him to the Greek), Malin Åkerman (set to play Blondie singer Debbie Harry in the upcoming CBGB flick) and Hollywood star Tom Cruise. The soundtrack promises to deliver on the hair metal, with renditions of Whitesnake‘s Here I Go Again, Twisted Sister‘s I Wanna Rock and Bon Jovi‘s Wanted Dead or Alive, while Cruise himself sings Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard‘s Pour Some Sugar on Me.
With the movie having been released this week, the reviews are starting to appear online and in magazines, with some praising the energy and glamour of the movie, while others criticise its shallow and camp approach. This criticism seems ironic, however, as many of the issues reviews have pointed out are the same issues that music lovers have with hair metal. In their write-up The New York Times said, “There isn’t any grit to these people or their art, not a speck of dirt anywhere. It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.”
The Los Angeles Times seemed to have more fun with the picture. Kenneth Turan seemed particularly impressed with what he described as Cruise’s “fearless” performance; “Heavily tattooed and heroically self-absorbed, with a capuchin monkey for a pet and a devil’s head codpiece for his leather pants, the lead singer of Arsenal oozes wicked charisma in the most wasted way, and it’s Cruise’s deadpan work that makes the man so entertaining to observe.” The always cynical Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gavce a completely negative review of the movie, in which he states, “s a sentimentalised and weirdly humourless movie — targeted at the middle-aged at heart — in which the rock scene is celebrated as a world where the descending model of Stonehenge is always the right size.”
New York Observer’s Rex Reed was equally disappointed, declaring that the “clusterfuck” was the worst movie he had seen since “Battlefield Earth and Howard the Duck.” Deadspin were another one to praise Cruise’s scene-stealing performance (just as he had done with Tropic Thunder); “Cruise is without question the best thing about Rock of Ages and certainly the only reason to see it… He gives you more than you were asking, more, probably, than any sane actor would or should. Watching him just go balls-out over-the-top—including a bravura, oddly hypnotic, holy-shit-is-he-really-doing-this rendition of Wanted Dead or Alive that has more sincerity in it than Jon Bon Jovi has expressed in 20 years—is, in a batshit way, sort of inspiring; Cruise just fucking goes for broke… It’s impossible not to admire him for it. And that probably tells you all you need to know about Rock of Ages: Tom Cruise is the best, and probably most metal, part of it.”
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