Review of Aloha (2015) by Ydnar4 — 08 Aug 2015

Aloha is directed by Cameron Crowe and stars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams as well as other stars like Bill Murray, Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin in the supporting cast. In this film Brian Gilcrest (Cooper), a military contractor returns to Hawaii, a place where a significant amount of his life occurred.

There he meets an ex-girlfriend (McAdams) who he begins to reconnect with and he begins to fall for a young Air Force captain (Stone) who was chosen to watch over him. There are also a lot a sub-plots that take away from this overall story, there is also a blessing and another story about rockets being launched.

Cameron Crowe has done a great job in the past with blending romantic comedy with other genres. With Jerry Maguire it was sports and with Almost Famous it was music and with Aloha he appears to want to do so with the military.

Sadly this film fails to impress and it is a fairly disappointing effort from an excellent cast and director. Every romantic comedy needs a likeable couple that the audience can love and Aloha does not have that.

Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone are two huge Hollywood stars that are at the peak of their career but it is apparent from the outset that these two actors do not have the chemistry that it takes. The story also doesn’t really give the pair time to get acquainted with each other and the romance is spawned out of the blue.

Emma Stone is a really hyperactive character to the point that she doesn’t even feel believable at times and it seems like there is no spark between the two. In the beginning of the film Bradley Cooper’s character dislikes Emma Stone’s character and nothing really significant happens to change that before the romance begins.

Rachel McAdams only seems to be in this movie in order to create a love triangle and even that is weak. I’m not going to say that any of these actors gave a bad performance its just that they weren’t meant to work together.

Aloha is also clogged with a bunch of other stories involving Bradley Cooper’s job and I just didn’t care about it. There is no flow at all from scene to scence and the film is moving from stupid story to stupid story and none of the scenes appear to have much relation.

The sub-plot about the rockets is just so ridiculous and uninteresting that Bill Murray couldn’t even save it. Bill Murray is painfully underused in this movie as well and the trailers sold him a wise man who appeared to have a significant impact on Cooper’s personal life and that just doesn’t happen and I was really disappointed about that.

Then to top it all off the movie isn’t even funny, I did not laugh at all. Aloha was a major let down and this flow hit hard for me because I am such a huge fan of Almost Famous it is one of my favorite films.

I still have confidence that Cameron Crowe can still revolutionize films and I will be checking out his next film. I think he just bit off way more than he could chew in this movie.