Is Aloha the worst chick flick ever?

IT’S had shocking reviews the world over despite an all-star cast featuring Hollywood’s hottest actors. So what does Leigh Paatsch think of Aloha?

This photo provided by Sony Pictures Entertainment shows Bradley Cooper, left, and Rachel McAdams in a scene from Columbia Pictures' "Aloha." The movie releases in U.S. theaters on May 29, 2015. (Neal Preston/Sony Pictures Entertainment via AP)

Aloha (PG)

Director: Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire)

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

Rating: *1/2

“The script is ridiculous, and we all know it ... I don’t care how much I love the director and the actors ... It never, not even once, ever works.”

Ouch. There have been plenty of scathing reviews around for Aloha, but this one takes the cake.

Disjointed ... Bradley Cooper and Rachel McAdams in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha.

What’s more, these are not the words of an aggrieved film critic.

The opinions quoted above belong to former Sony Pictures chief executive Amy Pascal, whose studio backed Aloha during a lengthy and fraught production process spanning almost seven years.

So rest assured, Ms Pascal is pretty much speaking the truth when it comes to the meandering mess that is Aloha.

As the title implies, the principal setting is Hawaii. As usual, the American tropical island state looks a zillion bucks from every angle. So if it’s just scenery you’re after, you’ll have no problems with Aloha.

Star power ... Bradley Cooper and Alec Baldwin head up a great cast.

However, once a story is threaded together with all those pretty pictures, the problems just don’t stop coming.

Bradley Cooper plays Brian, a new arrival in Honolulu for reasons that are undoubtedly dubious, but will never become all that clear.

His job is equally shady: Brian is some kind of covert double-agent defence contractor, with ties to both the US space satellite program and the world’s richest communications tycoon (Bill Murray).

Looking for love ... Emma Stone plays Air Force pilot Allison in Aloha.

Brian’s romantic inclinations while in Hawaii are equally difficult to determine. He keeps bumping into Tracy (Rachel McAdams), a woman he never quite married when he had the chance several years ago.

Now Tracy is married to someone else, but her attraction to Brian has never really gone away. Instead, Tracy starts wishing her incommunicative husband (John Krasinski) might go away.

Brian is also being actively pursued by a pretty Air Force pilot named Allison (Emma Stone). She has been assigned by her superiors to monitor Brian’s dodgy movements on his latest assignment, but he’s such a dreamboat that any professional resistance by Allison soon proves useless.

Cute couple ... Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone have plenty of chemistry in Aloha.

A strangely disjointed screenplay can never really dispel the notion that each featured player has a different movie in mind to their fellow cast members.

While Cooper and Stone do have a real screen chemistry in their scenes together, their characters are as phony as it gets. Even Bill Murray can’t get anything happening with a part that defies all logical explanation.

Originally published as Is Aloha the worst chick flick ever?