Cast: I won't even attempt to conceal that Emma Stone as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, however contrived, is something that I'm going to enjoy watching. Bradley Cooper is fine. He's not my favorite Crowe leading man. He's not bad though. Rachel McAdams does really well when she's given the time to in this. The rest of the cast are just a collection of quirks with little character to speak of. John Krasinski is asked to play as silent as possible (in the one scene at the end when he gets to really be funny, he soars). Danny McBride moves his fingers a lot. Alec Baldwin yells. Bill Murray...well, he's an odd mix of Machiavellian mind games, charming quirks, and unmotivated villainy. He's more of a plot device than a character.
Plot: Brian Gilcrest (Cooper) is a journeyman contractor who used to be something with the military and/or NASA, which went sour or something, and now he works for billionaire Carson Wells (Murray) doing something (a mix of Public Relations and mission control, I think) in Hawaii, where Brian used to live. He has a military liaison, Allison Ng (Stone), who is - I already said Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right? - an enterprising and energetic star in the military. Then there's Tracy (McAdams), Brian's old flame, who has a family with Woody (Krasinski) now. There's some problems with that marriage because Woody refuses to talk, almost ever. Brian falls for Allison, although he needs work some things out with Tracy as well as take care of a few personal daemons.
Somewhere, there's a 3hr. draft of the script that does every story justice. As it is, I get the sense that Crowe couldn't figure out what he wanted to cut out.
Elephant in the Room: I heard that Emma Stone is supposed to be playing a Hawaiian and Chinese, and she's not either, at all. I don't have much room to be outraged. That was a dumb, dumb move. I mean, make her an 1/8 Hawaiian and not Chinese maybe. It's only important to her character to have Hawaiian heritage. That's all. I can't complain too much though, considering that without her in this role, I'd've seen San Andreas this weekend instead. Dumb move though.
To Sum Things Up:
On the surface, there's little difference between a Cameron Crowe movie that works and one that doesn't. I fully believe that any of his films are a few editing tweaks from being as relaxed and uplifting as Almost Famous or Jerry Maguire or as meandering and tedious as Elizabethtown. Sadly, the final cut of Aloha is more similar to Elizabethtown (oddly similar plots even). A lot of small things in the movie do work. Stone brings a bashfulness out of Cooper that I didn't know he had. McAdams and Cooper are pretty wonderful together. There's a scene at the end between Cooper and Krasinski that's goofy and sweet. It's an easy movie. Crowe's script is allergic to detail, which makes a lot of it feel like an outline to get to the couple moments that he wrote the script for. Ultimately, what probably most hurts this movie is that there's no "Show me the money", no "You had me at hello", no John Cusack standing at Ione Skye's window holding a stereo above his head, no "twenty seconds of insane courage", no singing "Tiny Dancer" on the bus. There isn't the kind of stand out moment that makes the rest of the movie work*. This movie is fine, especially if you are a fan of Crowe's. It's not great. It may even be bad, but again, I'm a sucker for Emma Stone being delightful.
*Now, it is fair to ask if those moments make the movies great or if they are simply the best moments in already great movies.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
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