Too Tame to Rock
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
If the meek inherit the Earth, they'll give an Oscar to "The Rocker." But, being meek, they won't tell anybody.
Rainn Wilson plays Robert "Fish" Fishman, a drummer fired by the group Vesuvius when a music exec decides his own wannabe son is a better skins-pounder. Vesuvius goes on to greatness, and Fish goes on to bitter nothingness.
If only the movie had some bite, some edge, some insight. Its idea of rock depravity is Wilson gargling beer, an image so mild it makes you pine for the harder-edged comedy of the Judd Apatow school, where sexuality and profanity (and R ratings) are proudly confronted. Those movies are also funny in a way the fall-down-go-boomisms of "The Rocker" never achieve.
The disappointed Fish, with all his options spent, takes up residence in his sister's attic in working-class Cleveland, where he can see the lights of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame through the dormer. He's asked to sub as drummer in a garage band on prom night (he's 20 years older than his bandmates, and don't you just know it, they turn out to have a great sound.
Only Christina Applegate, as one of the moms, has any life or sparkle and seems slightly real, and there's a shred of what might have been an interesting movie as she and Wilson develop a relationship, despite the drumsticks in his pocket.
But the big flaw is the miscasting of Wilson. He's fabulous on "The Office" and has dominated in a movie before, in the long-ago and all-but-forgotten "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," where he bossed poor Luke Wilson around.
But the kids he bosses around here never give him much of a fight. The piece is structured around a performer whose specialty is inappropriately intense anger and hysteria.
Rainn Wilson seems entirely too intelligent, too articulate, too rational for such behavior. And basically that's the movie right there: Its whole trick is Wilson vs. the kids, and it just doesn't work. You can't even call it bad; it's just . . . negligible.
-- Stephen Hunter
The Rocker PG-13, 102 minutes Contains drug and sexual references, nudity and profanity. Area theaters.
