Review Roundup: Bradley Cooper & Emma Stone Star in ALOHA

Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, and Rachel McAdams star in the new romantic-comedy ALOHA. The movie was directed and written by Cameron Crowe.

ALOHA follows the story of a revered military contractor who returns to the US Space Program in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he experienced the greatest success of his career. In Hawaii, he finds himself in a love triangle between an old, lost-love, and a new Air Force watchdog who was assigned to him.

ALOHA stars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, and Alec Baldwin.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

A.O. Scott, The New York Times: "Aloha" has too much story and yet not quite enough, and its rhythms are rushed and pokey. It skips like a record playing in the bed of a pickup truck. Themes pop into the sky and then fade like vapor trails. We're invited to think about lofty, global matters like the fate of American identity in an age of corporate hegemony and then told to forget about it and have another beer. Potential conflicts arise only to be set aside or resolved, and Mr. Crowe seems reluctant to allow the possibility of unhappiness to linger long enough for the restoration of happiness to feel welcome and earned. Everybody is too eager to forgive, forget and move on. I guess that goes for me too.

Andrew Barker, Variety: Unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible, "Aloha" is unquestionably Cameron Crowe's worst film. Paced like a record on the wrong speed, or a Nancy Meyers movie recut by an over-caffeinated Jean-Luc Godard, the film bears all the telltale signs of a poorly executed salvage operation disfigured in the editing bay. But as far as misfires from great American filmmakers go, it's a fascinating one, less a simple failed Cameron Crowe film than a total deconstruction.

Sara Stewart, New York Post: In the middle of Cameron Crowe's "Aloha," a character is revealed to have had an extra big toe accidentally stitched onto his own after a combat accident.This illogical surgical snafu is emblematic of the film itself, a jumble of too many plots involving characters who almost never talk or act like real people. There are grand, romantic speeches that will endure forever from Crowe's earlier work - "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything . . ." - but you can't build an entire movie on them. Nobody wants two hours of "You had me at hello."

Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter: If one thing is clear in the deeply confused Aloha, it's Cameron Crowe's affection for the Hawaiian landscape and native culture. His off-the-tourist-track look at Honolulu abounds with intriguing views of unexpected terrain and offers a glimpse of the indigenous population's independence movement. All of which suggests a far more compelling movie than the muddled redemption story he's made.

Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post: Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe's "Aloha," a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched. Crowe - who gave the world such deathless lines as "You had me at 'Hello,' " the man who put the boom box in Lloyd Dobler's defiantly upstretched arms - spends so much time running away from his roots in "Aloha" that he misses the point of his own movie. Only a filmmaker out to put a permanent stake in the rom-com would take a couple of fizzily attractive movie stars and plop them into a story that hinges, not on a long-awaited first kiss or third-act Hail Mary, but on sundry bits of arcana involving Hawaiian mythology, military privatization, space weaponry and - be still, our beating hearts - sound transducing.

Pete Hammond, Deadline: I confess I have a soft spot for Hawaii-set films and this genre (I even got married in Hawaii and return every year), but I also am a fan of Crowe's brand of moviemaking. I hate to knock the rare major studio movie aimed at grown-ups in a summer full of superheroes, earthquakes and dinosaurs. And thankfully, I don't have to. Crowe clearly is a romantic at heart and has created an intriguing film dealing with a man whose personal life is caught somewhere in the middle between his past and future.

Scott Mendelson, Forbes: Cameron Crowe's Aloha is a structural and narrative mess. It arrives barely stitched together after copious post-production tinkering, with clear signs of what amounts to a missing first act and barely anything resembling a coherent story. It features a poorly defined would-be McGuffin and a plot with massive chunks either removed or neglected along the way. Not since The Avengers (no, not THAT Avengers) have I seen a major summer release so heavily compromised to the point of near-incoherence thanks to the test screening/post-production process. But despite all of that, the film is relatively entertaining, with a halfway decent middle section that does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: Ultimately, Crowe's exotic love story boils down to this question: Can Stone teach Cooper to love again and save his soul before it's too late? Go ahead, take a wild guess. Better yet, don't. She can and she does. I just saved you ten bucks. It's said that in Hawaii, the word "Aloha" is a greeting that translates to both "Hello" and "Goodbye." In this case, Aloha also means "Stay Away."

Max Nicholson, IGN: Aloha is one of those movies that hopes its all-star cast will save it from being bad. In this case, it only kind of works, and not even consistently. That's unfortunate considering the talent assembled for Cameron Crowe's latest: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski and Bill Murray. Neither strictly a comedy nor drama, Aloha is probably best described as a "military romance movie," but even that isn't quite right. Ultimately, the film doesn't know what it is, and that leads to countless moments of not knowing whether to invest in or laugh at the characters.

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Despite a blue-chip cast, "Aloha" is just frustrating. It can barely tell its story straight, and Crowe's attempt to get back to the days of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" is bittersweet in ways unrelated to the narrative's seriocomic vein.

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