By SETH HYNES
Aloha (PG)
Starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams
ALOHA is a sleep-inducing, catastrophic wreck of a movie.
Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is a military contractor stationed in Hawaii to secure a blessing for a public project, but soon gets involved in more serious matters.
Who would have thought that an innocent romantic comedy would challenge Fifty Shades of Grey as worst film of the year?
Cooper is a charming actor, but his character is a self-absorbed jerk, and Emma Stone (as his air force liaison Captain Allison Ng) is annoyingly earnest and over-the-top.
Most of the character development is dryly told to us through contrived dialogue. The plot is empty and lacking in conflict, and the romantic interactions are never convincing, full of shallow over-reactions and an off-putting age-gap between Cooper (40) and Stone (26).
Critics and audiences have criticised Aloha for depicting a very white Hawaii, when in fact only about a quarter of Hawaiians are Caucasian.
The film pays lip-service to Hawaiian traditions with a weird mystical element that has no meaningful pay-off, and Gilcrest’s project receiving a blessing from native Hawaiian leaders feels almost incidental to the overall movie.
The sub-plot about weaponised satellites not only feels more at home in the Reagan era, but it’s a very cynical rebuke of privatised space enterprises.
On every level, Aloha is insultingly terrible.
