Before I get to the meat of the story, something you all should know about me is that I’m a huge fan of musicals. I can geek out over Andrew Lloyd Weber as well as I can about X-Men. I grew up in a community where musical theater was the absolute norm. I’m also a product of the 80’s. So it should come as no surprise that when I heard there was a musical full of 80’s hair metal music, I was ON BOARD. And Tom Cruise as a burnt out metal singer? Sign me right the fuck up!
 |
| It's OK, he only THINKS he's a god. |
So needless to say I had some hopes. They weren’t that high because only very few musicals translate well to film, but I still had some faith because it had a pretty strong cast (Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti to name only a few) and I knew I would like the songs being sung. What came next was the worst movie-going experience of my life.
| That's about right. |
It’s hard to tell where to start. How about the positives, because there are very few. Tom Cruise is good. Not his greatest, but he wasn’t bad. It had some funny moments. I did genuinely laugh at genuinely funny parts. T.J. Miller (Hud in Cloverfield) takes his 45 seconds of screen time and makes it the best 45 seconds of the film. One or two of the songs were done really well. OK. That’s as nice as I can be. Now for the rest:
Our two main characters are of indiscriminate age. They look like 22 year olds playing 17 year olds, but were drinking through the whole movie at bars. Their storylines are pretty basic, both moved to Hollywood to make it huge in the music business and work at a venue bar (Think House of Blues). Tom Cruise’s character got his start there and is playing his final show there. Alec Baldwin runs the bar and Russell Brand is his right hand man. There’s also Catherine Zeta Jones as the mayor’s wife who is trying to prevent Tom Cruise from ever performing again. And some reporter who sleeps with Tom Cruise but writes horrible things about him. Paul Giamatti plays the slimy agent who screws over every person he encounters. And last but CERTAINLY not least, the insanely talented Mary J. Blige as the influential black character. More on her later...
 |
| 1400 lbs of talent. 3000 lbs of shit. |
One of the biggest problems with this movie is that it’s one thing to have 80’s music set in the 80’s. It’s something else entirely to attribute all of these real songs to fictional groups and people! Tom Cruise’s band seemingly wrote all Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Journey and Foreigner songs because they claim them as such. Another problem is the mixture of an actual performance of a band, and the sudden outburst of song in an otherwise normal setting. You can have one or the other, but not both. The first time it happens the audience laughed because they weren’t sure yet what kind of movie we were watching. Was this supposed to be tongue-in-cheek? I gave it 30 minutes and I could see that it was clearly not. I braced for impact.
 |
| This was to be taken seriously. |
While I said there were some performances that were good, the majority were awful. Fans of musicals need some flair, some flash, some mother fuckin' spirit fingers. Rock lovers need explosions and broken guitars. Instead they were very basic dance moves from everyone involved, and it just looked like they were stumbling over each other in robotic fashion. I laughed more during their dance scenes than I did at the actual comedy, and at no point was it intended.
The theater I was in was understandably mostly women and the few men who were dragged there by their girlfriend (I was in the opposite of that). Women were cheering and clapping and I just couldn’t understand why? This movie has so much hatred for women I couldn’t believe it ever got made. Tom Cruise is constantly draped in women. His entrance is of him in a bed covered in naked women. Women faint when they see him. Then there are the women who HATE his character. They hate him because all they want to do is sleep with him. This is not my interpretation, they make this very, very clear. Anytime the Christian right is shown, it’s via women only, and they’re all a bunch of crazy hypocrites. Every seemingly decent woman on screen essentially gets their souls sucked out by the end.
 |
| Slightly worse than this. |
But the most intense hatred for women is through our "inspirational black woman" played by Mary J. Blige. When all the chips are down and our leading lady is hitting rock bottom, she meets M.J.B. M.J.B. runs a strip club. The star wants to be a waitress but M.J.B. keeps pushing her to be a stripper. She tells her she needs to be a strong woman who doesn’t take crap from anyone and all that inspiring mumbo jumbo, and that to do that she needs to be a stripper. And when even being a stripper isn’t making her happy (GASP!) she falls back for the leading man and lets him do all the work and rides his coattails through to the closing credits.
I’m happy to say we had free tickets to see it, and the ONLY reason I didn’t walk out halfway through was because I was planning on reviewing it anyway. Don’t pay for it. Don’t download it. Don’t see it. If it’s on TV some day, change the channel. Run far far away from this piece of garbage.
0 / 10
No comments:
Post a Comment