Black rocks out

Jack Black, a heavymetal wastrel kicked out of his own band for rocking too hard, manages to ensnare a job as a substitute teacher in a smart elementary school.

It soon dawns on him that his high-achieving 10-year-olds, so fine on their oboes and cellos, have enough talent between them to put together a new band.

"You. Who do you like?" Black asks the form prefect. "Wrong!" is his reply to "Christina Aguilera". All classes except rock appreciation, rock history, and band practice are cancelled.

One settles back in anticipation: this, you sense, with the talent on board, is the happiest, funniest idea in years. Black (John Belushi meets Mary Poppins) is impossible to dislike, and Joan Cusack plays the school's uptight headmistress as a woman on the verge of a long-deferred first orgasm of incalculable scale and violence. Plus you get to see a marvellous scene in which pre-pubescents gradually put together Smoke on the Water.

Still, you feel a little shortchanged. What could have been a sort of Bugsy Malone Filth and the Fury, potentially the slyest satire on rock and roll imaginable, is in fact essentially designed to ensure a nine-figure gross.

School of Rock just doesn't rock. It has no appetite for destruction. No raw power. It's like late Whitesnake. Tidied-up, over-produced. Jack Black is not, sad to say, Jack White.

School Of Rock
Cert: PG