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Aloha (2015), PG-13, ★1/2

Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone laughing at something.
"Hawaii is paradise..." Ok, I'm not going to start advertising the luscious state...but it is a beautiful place to vacation with your loved ones. Nevertheless, it is a state of beautiful images of the blue water of waves crashing into the land and you keep hearing that and it is soothing at times. It is a sense of relaxation. A sense of relaxation that transcends your honest stress into beautiful harmony of awe and excitement. I did cheat a little bit as I said I was not going to start advertising Hawaii, but I lost it. But, this movie is set in Hawaii and it is real pretty, however, the convoluted plot-line(s) can be set anywhere because it does not matter where it is set, this is a lousy movie from a gifted writer/director.

Brian Gilchrist (Bradley Cooper) is a military contractor who has a second chance in Hawaii because he felt that his boss who is now a billionaire, Carson Welch (Bill Murray) abandoned him when Brian seriously messed up in Kabul. When he flies over there, he meets his pilot John 'Woody' Woodside (John Krasinski) and Alison Ng (Emma Stone), his Air Force liaison, a decorated no-nonsense officer who is devoted to Brian, saluting him and persuading Brian to change his coffee order to a stronger cup of coffee. LOL.

We also meet with Colonel Lacy (Danny McBride) who informs Brian that his ex-girlfriend, Tracy (Rachel McAdams) is now married to Woody and handles ceremonies for the dead. Later, while flying, Ng tells Brian that he met the king of the Hawaiian nation and tells a story about it. She reveals that she is 1/4 Hawaiian. Ok? They make conversation with each other while hiking on the Hawaiian grasslands and they start to bond and be romantically linked with each other. He also balances that relationship with Ng with his professional life and also his relationship with Tracy as he questions whether or not one of her children is his.

McAdams and Cooper in paradise. 
Cameron Crowe is in a slump unfortunately because two of his movies were great: Say Anything... and Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire is a very good movie. However, ever since Vanilla Sky, his movies have been bad to very bad, and even though We Bought a Zoo has its moments and I did like the ending, this movie is close to being Crowe's worst film next to Elizabethtown. This movie is all over the map in terms of tone, editing, storytelling and character development. You can tell that this was edited clumsily because Amy Pascal from Sony hated the first draft of the film so Crowe and his filmmakers needed to haste. It sort of turns to a Hawaii advertisement with great actors in there with some Hawaiian natives.

The delicate construction of this storytelling is lazy because some of the dialogue borders on from realistic to incoherent because based on the exchange of two characters, one jumps from relevance to randomness. The movie is all over the place and I can see about four films in that one movie and it is jumbled. This movie is an unfocused and unorganized film that focuses on beautiful characters in paradise.

Bradley Cooper is fine in the performance but does not navigate the character quite well and also does not have great chemistry with Emma Stone, who ranges from cringeworthy to believable. They both are imbalanced characters. Rachel McAdams is pleasant in her role as she faces a muted husband and has to persuade Bradley Cooper's character that they had something. John Krasinski had about no dialogue which is great. I wished we had more of Bill Murray, Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin because they had moments and could have given us some entertainment.

What astonishes me is that the film is about 1 hour and 50 minutes and the pacing is inconsistent as the movie is edited arbitrarily and the scenes are incoherent to other scenes in the film. This is a photo album of Hawaii with different pictures from different years in the album. It is a mess. However, there are moments of creative and original dialogue and a few entertaining performances, but the movie is a forgettable tale that pushes the envelope of ineptness and emptiness that meshes the characters and subplots badly. Cameron Crowe needs to bring his A-game back and this is not it.

*1/2

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