'Destiny' starts strong but fades

Jack Black has dropped his sweetness and gone back to his roots.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Jack Black feeds his frustrated inner arena rocker in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny." It's his long-planned movie about Tenacious D, a two-man-group he bills as "the most awesome rock band in the world."
No PG giggles teaching kids the "School of Rock" here. The lesson might be the same -- music began and ended with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. But Tenacious D (Black and his pal, Kyle Gass) are strictly R-rated.
So let the F-bombs, the bong hits, the Satan worship, penile push-ups and flatulence jokes fly, brothers and sisters. It is time to rock!
"Pick of Destiny" has Black and the singularly un-photogenic Gass re-telling the "story" of how they came to be the "greatest band in the world" in a musical farce that's all about power ballads, power chords, power riffs and power slides across the stage.
It doesn't matter that he and Gass are acoustic guitarists, that Gass includes Bach and Mozart in his repertoire. Black, "JB," as he is called here, can Axl Rose-howl a lyric over just about anything. We meet him as a demonic guitar-kid with a Ronnie James Dio fixation.
Dad's a preacher, and the kid is just rebelling. Perfect casting? Meat Loaf is that preacher dad, a rocker of operatic girth and lung-power. He's the guy Black wants to be when he grows up.
How they meet
"Rock 'n' roll's the devil's work. He wants you to rebel," the Loaf sings. So the kid runs away, and when he meets Kyle playing for change on Venice Beach, he finds his muse.
"Teach me your ways," he implores, and soon, Tenacious D is born.
They train. Tenacious D perform their acoustic-flavored metal, Black goes hilariously gonzo as he does.
"I did not mean to blow your mind!"
The opening 20 minutes are hilarious, and almost entirely sung, a real rock opera, or at least a parody of one.
But to reach the Van Halen heights, they need to locate a magical talisman, the one guitar pick that every "shredder" from Robert Johnson to Slash played with. "The Pick of Destiny," carved out of the devil's tooth, becomes their quest.
And the movie pretty much collapses once Ben Stiller, as a music store clerk who knows the pick's legend, gives them their mission, and Tim Robbins shows up as a crippled veteran of the pick quest.
The journey is dull, and the finale a serious letdown. They were going for "Crossroads." They settled for "VH-1 Storytellers."
Still, as a piece of juvenile raunch, "Pick of Destiny" gets the job done. Black loses his sweet streak and re-establishes his street cred with the 30something pot-head classic-rock crowd. But did he really need to?