Heart-warming at first, quickly loses steam

Rating: 5/10 (16 July 2011)

The first fifteen minutes of this movie is great, it's filled with beautiful, melancholic scenes. A washed-up musician trying to go for one last moment of fame, that's a story you can get into, and Rainn Wilson plays his role in a fairly convincing way. Sadly, what follows is rather lame and different from what I expected. There's very little actual humor in this movie, the characters are totally one-dimensional (meet alternative teenage girl #9542) and the whole thing is constantly swimming dangerously close to the dreaded Disney Channel territory. Just check out the music itself, it almost sounds like the Jonas Brothers' lost tapes. Tough to imagine an aspiring metal artist would want to be in a 1000-mile radius of this band, but that's just one of the many weird things we just have to suck up. And of course there are also subplots about love interests, there's just no possible way to avoid that in this kind of movie. They slow the movie down more than anything, which makes it rather boring to boot. This movie is very similar to "School of Rock", but somehow it's also lots worse.