Aloha

Cameron Crowe is one of my all time favorite filmmakers. I have genuinely enjoyed everything he has done, even Elizabethtown and We Bought a Zoo. When Aloha was ramping up to come out earlier this summer I was naturally looking forward to seeing it. Then I started reading the reviews and quietly decided to wait to see it when it hit video. Now, a measly three months later, it has hit DVD and Blu-Ray and I decided to to invest two bucks and see if it really was as bad as everyone was saying. I am sorry to report that it really was a confusing, jumbled, and at times excruciating mess of a movie. I sat there in my living room in utter shock at the absolute travesty of a movie unfolding in front of me. How can the same man who made Almost Famous, a film I often cite as my favorite movie and certainly my favorite of his, make something this...misguided?

Bradley Cooper stars as Brian Gilcrest, a military contractor who returns to Hawaii to oversee the launching of a satellite by the company he works for. He used to be stationed in Hawaii when he was with the Air Force, so he has some history there, mainly in the form of ex-girlfriend Tracy (played by Rachel McAdams). Tracy is married to John "Woody" Woodside (played by John Krasinski) and the two of them have two kids. While he's there, he's assigned a military liaison, Allison Ng (played by Emma Stone), who takes great pride in the fact that she is 1/4 Hawaiian. Also skulking about is Bradley Cooper's boss and the owner of the satellite he's launching, Carson Welch (played by Bill Murray). Faced with both his past and a potential future with Allison, Brian finds himself at a crossroads in his life and has to decide what he wants to do, especially when it looks like Tracy and Woody's marriage may be in troubled waters. 

Everything I have detailed above is what passes for plot here for this movie. I'm amazed I got that much out of it, because so much of it is completely stalled. Hell, not even stalled, the engine has seized. Characters do things that make no sense at all, with their personalities all over the place (there were times when I wondered if Bradley Cooper's character was bi-polar). The movie has nothing resonating or hitting at all. I just watched it in a constant state of confusion trying to understand the plot of the film. And the movie is not meant to be confusing or mysterious. We're expected to follow along with these characters and have their actions and motivations make sense. But yet nothing does. We move from scene to scene with very little to tie it together. Brian and Allison go in very rapid succession from being relatively friendly with one another to suddenly hopping into bed together and then being in love with very little to support or explain their character's actions, but rather doing it because the plot demands it. This also leads to a truly bizarre and grotesque scene where Cooper's character explains that after a military accident he was involved in, he wound up with a part of someone else's toe sewn to his foot. I shook my head trying to wrap my head around the fact that this mess was made by the same guy who gave us Say Anything....    

I have to say though, for being such a mess this movie has an amazing cast. Along with the aforementioned Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray and John Krasinski, we also have Alec Baldwin and Danny McBride rounding out the cast. It has to be the most staggeringly large waste of a cast I have ever seen. The film perfectly captures the law of diminishing returns as Crowe once again trots out his favorite plot, the story of the broken man trying to pick up the pieces of his broken life and rebuild it, often with the help of a plucky female love interest, as seen twice before with Jerry Maguire and Elizabethtown. Pumping that same well for a third time was certainly not the charm as there seems to be little left to use with the remainders running on fumes. To Cameron, if by some chance you should happen to see this review, I really am sorry. Every filmmaker has at least one dud and unfortunately this one is yours. To my ever faithful readers, learn from my mistake, pass on this one and watch one of Cameron's other movies because this one it just a gigantic cinematic equivalent to the trainwreck in Super 8. Aloha can mean either hello or goodbye but in the case of this film it should only ever be used in the latter context.