Aloha (2015)

Although Emma Stone is the only reason I watched Aloha, I was still expecting it to be a nice romantic comedy, after all, it was written and directed by Cameron Crowe, the same man who wrote and directed the beautiful Almost Famous. Now my question is, how does someone go from writing something like that to writing something like this?

Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is a former Air Force pilot turned into a military defence contractor. He is hired by a billionaire (Bill Murray) to supervise the launch of a private rocket from a military base in Hawaii. But things get a bit complicated with the Hawaiian leader (Dennis Kanahele). As if that wasn't enough, his ex-girlfriend Tracy (Rachel McAdams), now married with kids, is there and an alluring Air Force pilot (Emma Stone) assigned to watch over him.

Honestly, I'm not even sure that makes any sense. The whole plot is so non-sense, thin and stupid, and it tries to be too many things at the same thing, failing on all fronts. Also, the film is supposed to be a romantic comedy, but the lack of romance and comedy and the way the story is developed make it look more like an action thriller, minus the action and the thrills of the genre. 

Have I mentioned that it's also very confusing? I wasn't even sure what was going on at some point in the movie. I guess the reason is that a lot of events happen but they don't make a lot of sense. Actually, the whole plot is like a collection of pointless conversations that try so hard to be philosophical but end up being just a tedious exchange of words.

Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox

The characters are pretty bad too. Sure, Crowe tries to give each some sort of characterization, still they come off as a bunch of one-dimensional characters. Development is nowhere to be found. And can we talk about the fact that for half of the film Bradley Cooper's character hates Emma Stone's character and then, like in a second, he is deeply in love with her? I mean, wow. And that love triangle between Cooper-McAdams-Stone, I'm sorry Cameron but it just doesn't work. If anything, it feels awkward, but not awkward in a way a love triangle is supposed to be. 

Writing a very bad script isn't Crowe's only accomplishment in Aloha. Nope, he was also able to get terrible performances from every single actor in the film. Each actor looks as confused as I was, as if they don't even know what was going on. There's no chemistry between Cooper and Stone, or Cooper and McAdams. Bradley Cooper is charming but not charming enough to distract you from this mess. Emma Stone is (a) miscast -- she plays Allison Ng, a character that's supposed to have Chinese and Hawaiian heritage -- and therefore is never believable and (b) she looks like a meth-head for half of the movie. At the beginning, she was talking so fast I had to use subtitles to understand what she was saying. I'm a fast-talker, but I could never be able to talk that fast. Rachel McAdams is utterly irritating. John Krasinski, Bill Murray and Alec Baldwin are completely wasted in this.