“Aloha” is a hot mess and a disaster on almost every level.
It is the latest labor of writer-director Cameron Crowe and centers on Brian Gilcrest, a former Air Force officer played by Bradley Cooper who had a childhood love of astronomy and all things pertaining to outer space. As a middle-aged adult, Brian has, by the film’s logic, sold out and become a contractor because, you know, that’s just what people do when they give up on life.
Brian has been contracted by eccentric billionaire Carson Welch, played by Bill Murray. Welch is your typical wealthy Hollywood villain who is evil because, well, he’s wealthy. It doesn’t become entirely apparent until the end of the movie, but Welch is militarizing space right under the military’s nose.
Why, you ask? What interest would Welch, or any private citizen, have in doing this? Is the military really not smart enough to sniff his true intentions out? What’s more, does he somehow believe that he won’t go to jail for the rest of his life when it’s discovered what he’s doing? As cartoonish as Murray’s character is, “Aloha” doesn’t have a cartoonish enough style to make Welch’s intentions believable.
None of the characters in “Aloha” get much more fleshed out than Gilcrest or Welch. They are memorable for their external quirks, but these quirks are not the tip of any figurative interior iceberg. Their motivations are incoherent and seem to be developed on the fly as the equally incoherent narrative deems them necessary.
Confusion and incomprehesibility abound in “Aloha.” Within the first ten minutes of the film, I developed the niggling feeling that I didn’t know what was going on, perhaps, I thought, because I wasn’t doing a good enough job of paying attention.
By about the halfway point, however, it had become apparent that Crowe had no more of a clue what his movie was about than I did. “Aloha” takes many clichéd ingredients — guy tries to reignite old flame with married ex-girlfriend, mismatched personalities form a romance, the perniciousness of greedy military contractors, the wisdom of the simple hippie locals, etc. — and pukes them out into an unpleasant collage with an inexplicable Hawaiian theme.
An obligatory romance between Gilcrest and Emma Stone’s character, Air Force Captain Allison Ng — she’s one quarter Hawaiian, we are repeatedly reminded — buoys the film only slightly. The pairing of Gilcrest and Ng, like most everything else in the film, is unearned and falls from the sky, but Cooper and Stone have almost enough charm between the two of them to make their scenes more bearable than the rest of the movie.
Almost — but not quite.
To sum up: Save your time and money. Otherwise, you’ll probably be tempted to say, “aloha” to “Aloha” well before the end credits roll.
