Aloha (2015)

Aloha is Cameron Crow’s new inexplicably muddled and terrible romantic comedy set in Hawaii. It’s a genuinely confusing and perplexing mess of a movie by a guy who can make actually good films as evidenced by Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. He also made the glorious trainwreck Elizabethtown that this movie feels like – but there was something genuinely charming in how messy and befuddled Elizabethtown was that this movie fails badly at imitating.

The premise of the movie involves civilian control of satellite rocket launches and native Hawaiian beliefs… or something. Bradley Cooper plays a man working for a civilian billionaire contractor who returns to Hawaii to help launch a satellite with the support of the US Air Force. Emma Stone is his jacked up, overly excitable Air Force liaison who is 1/4 Hawaiian native. Together they try to convince some native Hawaiian separatists to bless the launch of this satellite… meanwhile Cooper’s character runs into his former flame played by Rachel McAdams who is married to John Krasinski and they have two kids. And maybe the satellite isn’t everything the billionaire (played by Bill Murray for some reason) says it is and this upsets the Hawaiian gods… or at least the native Hawaiians. Meanwhile Danny McBride plays a character whose only personality is that he wiggles his fingers a lot (nicknamed Fingers because that’s quirky) and Alec Baldwin is a general who yells a lot.

This is a total mess of a movie full of tin-eared dialog no one would say, said in a hyperactive and shouty way by two characters who are supposed to be falling in love but have no chemistry and seem more like they hate each other. The editing is confounding, the plot just wanders around and is in no way relatable, the Hawaiian culture thing feels like window dressing, and it somehow makes Hawaii look ugly. That takes effort – this whole movie took effort to be this much of a trainwreck.

The most perplexing issue was the sound and sound mix. It was so so weird that I actually thought the theater’s surround sound system was broken. I asked the staff half-way through the movie if maybe only the front speakers were on it was such a muddle (they said everything was fine – I’m not convinced).

The film was apparently a disaster from early on. The hacked Sony email messages indicated that this movie had massive reshoots and editing to salvage it. I didn’t know that going in – only found out about it reading the (terrible) reviews. This makes me curious to see the original cut…. this movie is so inexplicably bad, I’m genuinely curious to see it again with the original director’s cut. That’s a special kind of bad.

Score: 59