Aloha

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, John Krasinski, Bill Murray

Directed by: Cameron Crowe

Reviewed by Brendan Dousi

[Rating: 2.5/5]

It’s big hollywood blockbuster season and I bet you’ve had just about your fill of high stakes action, single-shot action scenes, thin plots and giant explosions. Luckily, hiding among these big tentpole cinematic experiences are a number of smaller dramas that can act as a reprieve from all that mind boggling action. One of this season’s main contenders comes from tried and (mostly) proven Writer/Director Cameron Crowe and his hawaiian set romantic drama/comedy Aloha. Will it be able to satiate our desire for something smaller yet more substantial or should we just overlook this one and get back to our explosions?

A celebrated military contractor, Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), returns to his adopted home of Hawaii to negotiate with native communities over land for eccentric Billionaire Carson Welch’s (Bill Murray) satellite launching facility. It is here that he re-connects with past love Tracy (Rachel McAdams) and is inexplicably charmed by brash young pilot Allison Ng (Emma Stone). It’s up to Brian to not only decide which woman he should end up with, but whether he at all deserves either of their love.

Aloha is one of those slightly infuriating ‘middle’ films. A film that toes the line between comedy and drama so fickly that it ends up not being much of either. There are many elements at play here; a troubled marriage, a man coming to grips with his past, new romance, old romance, paternal struggles, hawaiian mysticism, natural land owners vs. white usurpers and even potential nuclear warfare. Yep. Nuclear Weapons come into play. The film is such a hodge-podge that it rarely seems to know what it wants to do and certain scenes shift so tonally that it is nothing sort of jarring. That is when the film isn’t meandering along at a snails pace not doing much of anything.

It’s not all bad, though, there is a fantastic cast at play here. Our three leads in Cooper, Stone and Mcadams are all powerhouses at their best and this leads to a lot of engaging scenes. Special props go out to John Krasinski as Tracy’s stoic husband ‘Woody’ who gives an enigmatic and humorous performance without barely uttering a word. When the film is funny it works well, with a great sensibility for witty dialogue, but these charming moments are too few and far between as the rest of the film fails to play up it’s dramatic aspects and doesn’t got far enough with it’s comedic ones.

Aloha is an inoffensive little film, unless you take offense to a half-chinese/quarter hawaiian being played by one of the whitest actresses in Hollywood, but it’s still not as substantial as you want it to be. The elements are there to exploit but the film never truly delves into it’s potentially meaty subjects and instead we’re left with something a little bland and simply just ‘nice’. It is nice to have a break from all the ‘summer’ blockbusters, I just wish this break was more worth the time.