Movie Review: 'Aloha'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Aloha, Aloha.
And welcome to the summer movie season, even though you're not a sequel or a prequel or a remake or a spinoff, and even though there's not a superhero or a gunfight or a car chase or an incendiary explosion in sight.
Aloha is a romantic comedy from director Cameron Crowe that boasts a come-hither cast but is burdened with a hither-and-thither plot.
Crowe is undoubtedly grateful to his fetching cast for being likable enough to smooth over the film's very rough edges because, as charming as many individual moments and exchanges in Aloha are, the storytelling ability that Crowe demonstrated so vividly early on in his career, while it doesn't exactly desert him this time, let's just say it struggles to keep its footing.
Maybe that's why the first half of the film often feels like the second half of a movie that you missed the first half of.
Bradley Cooper plays Brian Gilcrest, a cynical defense contractor and Air Force officer, wounded in Afghanistan, who returns to the United States' space program in Honolulu, Hawaii, the site of his triumphant military career. He has been assigned to oversee the launch of a weapons satellite from Hawaii. But Crowe's exploration of space exploration is either incoherent or incomprehensible.
There Brian more or less bonds with, and maybe falls for, the aggressive and enthusiastic Air Force pilot who is one-quarter Hawaiian and has been assigned to him as a watchdog, Allison Ng, played by Emma Stone.
At the same time, he finds himself reconnecting with an ex-lover played by Rachel McAdams, who married a virtually silent Air Force pilot played by John Krasinski after her relationship with Brian went kablooey.
That McAdams and Cooper have unfinished business, however, is obvious to everyone the moment they're in the same zip code.
>And while trying to get his love life in order, Brian finds an abandoned ethical value system kicking in, offering him a shot at some kind of redemption.
Writer-producer-director Crowe, whose impressive resume includes Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Say Anything, Singles, Vanilla Sky, and We Bought a Zoo, addresses the issue of the militarization of space as background for this romantic-triangle piece that also dabbles in Hawaiian culture and mythology and politics. But he can't seem to fuse the thrusts together so that they seem to be part of the same movie: Aloha has more subjects than its title has meanings.
The George Clooney-starring, Hawaii-set The Descendants, which shares a number of elements with Aloha, handled the juggling of same much more effectively.
Crowe's strong supporting cast also helps – and that includes Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, and Danny McBride, none of whom have enough to do. But Cooper, Stone, and McAdams are in the center ring, and perhaps it's the not only proverbial cutting-room floor that holds the secret to the film's essential confusion.
So we'll dance the hula wearing 2½ stars out of 4. This romcom is no bomb, but Aloha gets a begrudging hello and a quick goodbye.