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75
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
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.
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75
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
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.
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75
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San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli
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.
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70
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Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
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.
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63
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Boston Globe Ty Burr
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.?
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50
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Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
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.
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50
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The New York Times Manohla Dargis
It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.
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40
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Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx.
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38
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USA Today Claudia Puig
Don't stop believing. Just avoid clichéd musicals that try to capture the anarchic spirit of rock with trite commercial re-treads.
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38
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Washington Post Ann Hornaday
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.
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