Adam Shankman may be a good choreographer but man, is he a bad director! It’s pretty amazing how he manages to make a jukebox musical about the 1987 L.A. rock scene feel so flat, then he doesn’t seem to have any sense of what story he’s trying to tell, the pacing is off, the tone is all over the place (from campy to sappy to pseudo-trashy, in no consistent way)…

Still, I got a kick out of all the cheesy 80s hair metal and power ballads (Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Poison, Foreigner, etc.), even though some of it has been put to better use by “Glee” (Journey anyone?), and some of the performances are entertaining, if uneven, including those by Tom Cruise as a cross between Bret Michaels and Axl Rose, Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand as the owner and manager of a legendary rock club, Paul Giamatti as a sleazy manager and Malin Akerman as a reporter for Rolling Stone. Oh, and the monkey is awesome!

Not faring so well are Catherine Zeta-Jones as the self-righteous, hypocritical Mayor’s wife and Mary J. Blige as a strip joint owner, mostly because their characters feel superfluous. And then there are the two young leads, Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta, who are okay I guess, but not nearly charismatic enough to make up for how trite everything surrounding their characters is. Your mileage may vary, etc.