As I was watching the TVs at my gym this morning, ‘The Rocker’ was on, and during a commercial break, the trailer of ‘Rock of Ages’ came on, and I thought, ‘Oh I see, the 80s hair metal connection,… but how this connection looks dangerous for Cruise’s never-to-be-summer-blockbuster movie!’
Even though the 2008 movie is not even close of being a great movie, I remember it being quite entertaining, and if both movies are supposed to be regarded as parodies, 'The Rocker' has the merit to not take itself seriously at all. I haven’t seen ‘Rock of Ages’ but I have no plan to see it, the trailer just looks too awful. If it is supposed to be a satire, how can you cast Tom Cruise in the first place? The guy plays all his roles as if he was in an action movie or running for ambassador of the world, and I always wonder where Cruise the man stops, in all his egomaniac characters of alpha males.
In 'The Rocker', Rainn Wilson plays Fish, a drummer who got kicked off Vesuvius, a glam heavy metal band of the 80s, and then got stuck for 20 years with a boring office job. Since, he has become a living dead, staying in the attic of his married sister's house, but when his nephew forms a band and needs a drummer, he obviously gets the job.
The band is called A.D.D., but the only one having ADD seems to be Wilson’s character, your typical larger-than-life messy sloppy rocker, still partying hard as if it was still 1985.
Thanks to him, A.D.D. gets close to stardom and, oh surprise, they are offered to open for Vesuvius, and Fish finally gets his revenge. Between second chance, redemption and revenge, everything is highly predictable but Wilson plays his School-Of-Rock-Jack-Black with humor and conviction, trashing hotel rooms, jumping drunk in swimming pools, and teaching to the kids a few old tricks about partying, whereas these three are taking their career very seriously.
Even though all the characters walk like rock’ n’ roll clichés (Emma Stone plays the cute bassist, Teddy Geiger the heartthrob, pop-star-on-the-rise and Christina Applegate the cute manager-mom), the movie has its moments and will probably entertain you a million times more than Rock of Ages.
Come on, this trailer with naked-torso Cruise, looking like Conan the Barbarian with photo-shopped abs, singing some Poison song as if he was auditioning for Glee, was enough for me to predict that the film would bomb. If you play a parody, you cannot play it straightforward,… Axl Rose got fat and Rainn Wilson is way funnier than Cruise.