Aloha

Cameron Crowe hits rock bottom with this dull and mostly incoherent romance starring Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone, with the former playing a hotshot military contractor who arrives in Hawaii on business and subsequently finds himself falling for an oddball Air Force pilot (Stone’s Allison Ng). There’s exceedingly little contained within Aloha that wholeheartedly works, as writer/director Crowe augments the needlessly convoluted storyline with a whole host of misguided elements – with the best and most apt example of this the romance that inevitably forms between Cooper and Stone’s respective characters. It’s immediately clear that there’s not an ounce of chemistry between the two actors and indeed, the pairing feels more akin to a father/daughter relationship than a romantic coupling. Crowe’s emphasis on the pair’s artificial-sounding banter only exacerbates the less-than-convincing nature of their scenes together, which is a shame, really, given that both Cooper and Stone deliver top-notch, thoroughly charismatic performances here. And as ill-advised as the love story ultimately is, Aloha‘s descent into full-on disaster territory is triggered and perpetuated by a narrative that couldn’t possibly make less sense – with the hands-off atmosphere compounded by the ongoing introduction of almost astonishingly tedious subplots. It is, in the end, all-too-obvious that Crowe has completely lost his way, and one can only hope he finds his way back before he makes another trainwreck like Aloha.

*1/2 out of ****