Rock of Ages
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: June 15, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
47
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 42 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
17
Negative:
12
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
San Francisco ChronicleAmy BiancolliJun 14, 2012
Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJun 14, 2012
As a means of non-participatory time travel and non-intellectual stimulation, it's successful. Toe-tapping and eye-rolling are equally forgivable. Rock on. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter TraversJun 14, 2012
The hugely enjoyable Rock of Ages is saved by its music, a tasty brew drawn from Def Leppard, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison and Whitesnake. It's near impossible not to rock along. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertJun 13, 2012
The only problem is that the plot meanders when nobody is singing. If you're making the kind of movie where everybody in the audience knows for sure what's going to happen, it's best not to linger on the recycled bits. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranJun 14, 2012
Blessed with unstoppable energy, an undeniably bawdy sense of fun and Tom Cruise in backless leather pants, it takes songs you may never have loved and turns them into a musical that's easy to enjoy. Read full review
70
MovielineStephanie ZacharekJun 14, 2012
Seeing Tom Cruise swathed in leather pants and fake tattoos, as Axl Rose-style metal god Stacee Jaxx, is supposedly Rock of Ages' big draw. But the movie is much more fun when he's not around. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesJun 13, 2012
The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew O'HehirJun 13, 2012
Rock of Ages is an effulgent celebration of fakeness. It isn't trying to be real; it's trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before. Read full review
70
Boxoffice MagazinePete HammondJun 13, 2012
Blending a perfect brew of classic '80s songs, big laughs and rockin' performances, director Adam Shankman manages to make this film adaptation of the hit Broadway jukebox musical a red hot summer blast for people who grew up with glam metal - or just can't escape it on the radio. Read full review
67
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJun 13, 2012
Rock of Ages is nothing but a good time and sometimes less, slogging through the knee-deep hoopla of 1980s nostalgia at a jukebox pace. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJun 14, 2012
A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next. Read full review
63
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanJun 14, 2012
When Rock of Ages remembers it's supposed to be a cartoon, it's a noisy, sweaty, giddy ball of fun. When it suddenly develops a conscience or tries to process a thought deeper than "I love rock 'n' roll," it trips over its own feet. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrJun 14, 2012
The movie has its cheesy pleasures, and some of them are even intended. I'm just not sure whether Tom Cruise's impersonation of Axl Rose is one of them.  Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensJun 14, 2012
Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanJun 14, 2012
Rock of Ages is an experience that will alternately leave you embarrassed and amused. Read full review
60
EmpireOlly RichardsJun 13, 2012
Like every one of its songs, it makes a lot of noise about nothing much and cockily straddles awfulness and greatness. It's enormously entertaining nonsense. Read full review
60
Total FilmJane CrowtherJun 13, 2012
Disposable, overly long fun best enjoyed with BFFs and a bevvie. Read full review
60
Time OutKeith UhlichJun 12, 2012
Fans of Moulin Rouge–esque repurposing will be in hog heaven. Everyone else will want to hop that midnight train going anywhere pronto. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJun 22, 2012
Why, as a patron of Rock of Ages, do I wish I had taken the precaution of entering the theater drunk? [25 June 2012, p.84]
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyJun 14, 2012
Where this PG-rated adaptation of a hit Broadway show, adapted by Adam Shankman falls down is by being far too mild for its supposedly outrageous subject. Read full review
50
The New York TimesManohla DargisJun 14, 2012
It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsJun 14, 2012
The only edge in the movie is represented by Russell Brand, who actually lived the lifestyle, but he's muzzled by a bad Liverpool accent and a gay subplot that's as insincere as the swaggering anthems by fatuous hacks like Foreigner, Starship and Journey. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJun 14, 2012
Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJun 13, 2012
The movie, full of talented performers in search of a more propulsive vehicle, settles for workmanlike cover-band status, which makes this a cover-band tribute to a jukebox musical - a long way from true, trashy exhilaration. Read full review
50
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanJun 13, 2012
Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJun 13, 2012
Shankman gets enormously entertaining performances from Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin, so much so that it's a problem: The movie's not about them. Read full review
50
VarietyJustin ChangJun 10, 2012
Absent the infectious live-audience energy of Chris D'Arienzo's legit hit, this affectionate glam-rock-a-thon reps a visually bland staging of frankly insipid material, never tapping into the raucous, go-for-broke energy that would spin the show's cliches into gold, let alone platinum. Read full review
40
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJun 15, 2012
Unfortunately, like the Poison song says -- and, in many ways, like the decade itself -- it ain't nothin' but a good time. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJun 14, 2012
What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyJun 10, 2012
He (Shankman) succeeds in draining most of the fun from a vehicle that was all about the winking humor of its flagrant cheesiness. Read full review
38
New York PostLou LumenickJun 15, 2012
Shankman's staging of the numbers - especially the leaden choreography and hackneyed locations such as the Hollywood sign - was far sloppier and less creative than for his last musical, the vastly superior "Hairspray." Read full review
38
USA TodayClaudia PuigJun 14, 2012
Don't stop believing. Just avoid clichéd musicals that try to capture the anarchic spirit of rock with trite commercial re-treads. Read full review
38
Washington PostAnn HornadayJun 14, 2012
Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on. Read full review
33
The A.V. ClubNathan RabinJun 13, 2012
This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls. Read full review
30
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJun 16, 2012
Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap. Read full review
30
TimeRichard CorlissJun 14, 2012
Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenJun 13, 2012
Creating plot from lyrics, in this case, leads to heavy-handed literalism and limited creativity. The wall of music is amusing for a while, but grows into a loud, wearying assault long before the movie's two hours are up. Read full review
30
Village VoiceNick PinkertonJun 12, 2012
A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded. Read full review
25
Miami HeraldConnie OgleJun 14, 2012
Oddly tone deaf. Read full review
20
The GuardianPeter BradshawJun 14, 2012
Doubtless, like The Producers, it will be adapted back into the theatre, some time in 2017, at which time it will be even more bland and tiring. Read full review
12
Slant MagazineNick SchagerJun 13, 2012
If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable. Read full review
0
ObserverRex ReedJun 13, 2012
I haven't seen a movie this bad since "Battlefield Earth" and "Howard the Duck." Read full review
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