I think we’ve all been spoiled by good music movies, like Almost Famous (which, incidentally, Rainn Wilson was actually in) and School of Rock, or at least funny ones, if not necessarily good, like Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny. From the trailer you can quickly gather that The Rocker is not a serious movie; it’s about as serious as Step Brothers. What you can’t gather from the trailer is that The Rocker is also as dumb as Step Brothers.
It immediately starts out with intolerable goofiness, as Robert Fishman is kicked out of his 80s caricature band and turns into a movie monster. He chases his terrified bandmates down the street on foot at 60mph, jumping on top of the van and clawing his way across the roof using his drumsticks as hooks to pull himself along. When they slam on the brakes and send him flying into the street, first he appears to be dead but soon sits up like a zombie and turns his head like he’s possessed. Thus is the tone set and your eyes can safely glaze over for the rest of the movie.
Cut to 20 years later, where he is working a dead-end job sitting in front of a computer (I’m just now realizing the irony of me sitting here writing that last sentence), while his former bandmates have gone on to massive superstardom. Luckily, he soon finds his calling when a bunch of whiny high school kids ask him to play with their band as the drummer for their senior prom.
The tortured artist, the token fat guy, the old rocker, and the brooding chick with black nail polish and perpetual sneer.
All of the typical scenes are thrown in, the auditions for the new drummer where you get a whole stream of bizarre lunatics doing something ridiculous on the drums or the electric keyboard, the drummerless bandmates whining and lamenting their terrible luck when their idiot drummer boy gets grounded for bringing hash brownies to a Spanish convention at school, the caricature characters, etc.
The Rocker is a bland, flavorless combination of things like Youtube, MySpace, cheesy 80s rock, mind-numbing product-placement and, say, some kind of cardboard breakfast cereal. It is so uninteresting and so unfunny that it’s amazing to me that the thing was ever made. I get the feeling that it is purely because of the success of other rock comedies that this one was even considered.
What happens is, through his lack of understanding of modern technology (despite having a 40-hour a week job working in front of a computer), “Fish” does a virtual rehearsal one day with his band completely nude, thinking the webcam is a microphone. The video winds up on Youtube and it’s an instant hit. Record labels come knocking on the door, and the gigs start lining up.
What follows is an exercise in coming up with scenes where Fish can act as inappropriately as possible, showing that he not only failed as a musician, but fails as a human being in understanding even the simplest things about interacting with other people. Does rock really corrupt the mind like that?
Dominoes. More fun than The Rocker.
Almost without exception the jokes fall completely flat, like dominoes. Do you ever do that thing with dominoes where you stand them up all in a big line all over the house and then push one over and watch them all fall down and then you laugh and cheer and then immediately start looking dejectedly at the big mess you now have to clean up? Well, I haven’t done that for quite some time now, but I remember enjoying it much more than I enjoyed The Rocker.
Of course the good looking but perpetually depressed lead singer in the high school band is going to eventually start to notice the brooding and perpetually depressed girl in the band in ways that he hadn’t noticed her before. At a key moment in the film, he asks her if she’d like to have dinner with him, and he has to ask twice before she gets what he’s saying. In response, she smiles for the first time in the movie, and I slap my forehead in disgust for about the 200th time. The development of their little crush is so goofy and so childish that it’s almost weird. And no, I’m not going to apologize for ruining the kiddie romance at the end of the movie. If you don’t watch The Rocker because you read this review, you should thank me!
Grandpa's rocker. Also more fun than The Rocker.
As is to be expected, there comes a time when Fish and his new high school band must open for Vesuvius, the band that Fish was booted out of 20 years before. Incidentally, Vesuvius is headed by lead singer Lex, a Bret Michaels lookalike played by Will Arnett, who should have had the lead role in the movie. I’m sorry, but Rainn Wilson is just not funny. The superstar band has what their jerkoff manager calls an “Ashley Simpson situation,” and they’re booed off stage. The subsequent chanting of “A.D.D.” (the high school band’s name, possibly the most creative thing in the entire movie) over and over again is currently topping my list of Most Predictable Scenes of 2008.
Oddly enough, the only thing that wasn’t flat-out stupid about The Rocker is Christina Applegate’s character, who is well-written and performed, at least until late in the movie when she begins to adjust her behavior in order to adhere to the necessary Hollywood ending. She has clearly come a long way as an actress, but as is the case for just about everyone else involved, The Rocker is a huge step backwards. I recommend checking out Jack Black instead or, if you really want something good, check out where it all started…
The Holy Grail of rock comedies.