I agree with you that code metrics should not substitute a code review but I believe that they should complement code reviews. I think it gets back to the old saying that "you cannot improve what you cannot measure." Code metrics can provide the development team with quantifiable "code smells" or patterns that may need further investigation. The metrics that are captured in most static analysis tools are typically metrics that have been identified over the course of research in our field's short history to have significant meaning.
