Aloha reviews: 9 most scathing critical responses to Cameron Crowe's new movie

How rough are things for Cameron Crowe’s Aloha? Even Elizabethtown, the director’s high-profile 2005 flop, had a better score on Rotten Tomatoes. The negative reviews are par for the Aloha course, however, following leaked emails from Sony about the project’s troubles and protests about its title and depiction of native Hawaiians. With a 13-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes (as of this writing), Aloha stands as one of the most critically panned movies of 2015 thus far. Ahead, the nine most scathing reviews of Crowe’s latest “love letter.”

1. “It says a lot that Aloha is a bigger disaster than this weekend’s actual disaster flick, San Andreas, merited only by a cast that admirably acquits themselves of the movie around them, and the fact that we can assume the well-meaning Crowe meant well.” — Jen Yamato, The Daily Beast

2. “Tonally and thematically, Aloha feels like a willfully perverse return to Crowe’s 2005 Elizabethtown, the director’s biggest flop, but clearly a film he loves so much he inexplicably felt the need to make it twice, once in the American South and once even further south in Honolulu.” — Nathan Rabin, The Globe and Mail

3. “The movie’s just a jumble, a total mess, and that plays out in both macro and micro ways. On a macro level none of the individual scenes come together to form a coherent movie, while on the micro level some scenes are incoherent within themselves.” — Devin Faraci, Birth.Movies.Death

4. “With the new film, Crowe’s unique touch — the generosity with which he views his characters, the human race, and the world in general — seems almost completely lost. It gives me no pleasure at all to report that a mess with good intentions is still a mess.” — Ty Burr, Boston Globe

5. “Aloha isn’t horrible, but it does have a pitiable odor about it, like a dog that’s sat too long on the beach.” — Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

6. “[Emma] Stone wears her Top Gun flight suit and Ray-Bans like a champ, but she’s supposed to read as too-eager and dorky — and it just doesn’t fly (so to speak). ‘Can you think of a way to make ‘I’m a fighter pilot’ sound sexy?’ she responds when asked why she’s single. Um, yes: Literally any way you say it, especially when you look like Stone.” — Sara Stewart, New York Post

7. “It happens. Really talented directors sometimes step into the batter’s box, take a gigantic swing, and whiff. The only mystery is why it doesn’t happen more often. All of which is to say that you are about to read a lot of scathing reviews of Cameron Crowe’s latest film Aloha in the next couple of days that may or may not employ a lot of ‘Bad Lei’ puns. But the unfortunate, inescapable truth is, the movie really is that terrible.” — Chris Nashawaty, EW

8. “The result is a movie that’s well-meaning but nearly unwatchable. Stay home and watch a better Crowe movie instead, and ponder what went wrong.” — Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times

9. “This thing is bad in the ways that only an ambitious, personal project can be. Not bad throughout—the first half is actually pretty decent—but when it goes south, the nosedive is irreversible. If the final product had been three hours long, maybe Crowe could have juggled all his different aspirations. But even then, I think this would have been a disaster.” — Tim Grierson, Grierson and Leitch

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