Review

Aloha

Hotshot military contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is accosted by Air Force Gen. Dixon (Alec Baldwin) in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha.
Hotshot military contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is accosted by Air Force Gen. Dixon (Alec Baldwin) in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha.

Cameron Crowe fans -- and that includes most movie critics -- have cut him a lot of slack over the years.

Our love for Say Anything..., Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire made us embrace the big romantic gestures and little traces of heart in Elizabethtown, Vanilla Sky and We Bought a Zoo.

Aloha

67 Cast: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski, Dennis Bumpy Kanahele, Bill Murray

Director: Cameron Crowe

Rating: PG-13, for some language including suggestive comments.

Running time: 104 minutes

But Aloha is a breaking point, a movie that makes you start to see the guy as just, well, full of it. Whatever it was going to be -- and editing has been a Crowe problem since Elizabethtown-- Aloha has been reduced to a shambling, lurching Hawaiian comedy full of big-name actors making long, rushed, declamatory speeches.

And every minute or so, there's another annoying traditional Hawaiian song, or Hawaiian pop or blues or country tune. They're meant to tie the mess together, to allow the picture to coast along on musical emotions where script coherence is lacking.

But they don't. Even Elvis gets into the act. It's so grating that you find yourself waiting for Don Ho to croon "Tiny Bubbles."

Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is a one-time Air Force space program officer, wounded in Afghanistan, semi-disgraced and reduced to being the "fixer" for a space tech billionaire (Bill Murray, seemingly improvising his role). Gilcrest is back in Hawaii, at the little "Mayberry of a base" where he was stationed, to talk the natives into blessing a gate that's being moved so big missiles can be moved from location to location.

Rachel McAdams is the girl he left behind, married, with kids and a comically silent Air Force pilot husband (John Krasinski).

Danny McBride is an old comrade, now a colonel more or less in charge.

And Emma Stone is the eager beaver Captain Ng, a pilot assigned to be Gilcrest's minder, his shadow as he goes to deal with Hawaii's most nativist natives.

The movie's more Hawaiian than The Descendants, but the early culture clash promise -- "Below the Aloha exteriors?" "Casablanca, baby!" -- unravels. The president of the Nation of Hawaii independence organization (Dennis Bumpy Kanahele) just shrugs at how low his old friend has sunk.

"You're on the wrong side, bra'." At least he doesn't throw "Mahalo" in there.

The son of Gilcrest's ex-girlfriend is a space and Hawaiian mythology buff who insists Gilcrest is a mythical character, "The Arrival," newly returned to set the future in motion. A little magical realism helps set the expected Gilcrest/Captain Ng romance in motion. But it feels absurdly abrupt, the way we get to "Boy, am I a goner." That was to be this movie's "You had me at hello." It isn't. Not a lot of chemistry, despite Stone's enthusiastic plunge into the part.

The performances are passable, save for Murray, who goes ham, and Alec Baldwin as a general who goes comically nuclear. He at least leaves an impression.

The film-buff Hawaii resident Crowe has, in essence, made his Donovan's Reef, a movie John Ford and John Wayne did to celebrate Ford's World War II service in the Pacific and to get Paramount to pay for long tropical vacations for the cast and crew.

Aloha has a nod to the power of music and respect for religious traditions and the once promising frontier of space. But it's also about the versatility of that one-word title. Sadly, in this case, "Aloha" doesn't mean "Hello," or even "Welcome back, Cameron Crowe." This feels like goodbye, at least to his major studio film career.

MovieStyle on 05/29/2015

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