'Aloha': A weak poi of patter, with classic pop

Music has always been essential to Cameron Crowe's movies: the gigging and groupies of Almost Famous, the Peter Gabriel boom-box moment in Say Anything, the classic rock of Jerry Maguire. The music in the writer-director's Aloha, too, is key, from the swaying ukuleles of Hawaiian folk songs to the Who, the Rolling Stones, and Fleetwood Mac.

But another sound is prominent in Crowe's 50th State rom-com: the drip-drop of flop sweat.

For all the screwball patter, smart-aleck similes, and zingy one-liners that Crowe has handed his mismatched cast, a kerplunking emptiness runs through Aloha.

Bradley Cooper's Brian Gilcrest, a military contractor dogged by some bad history in Afghanistan, arrives at Hickam Field in Pearl Harbor with a simple assignment: to oversee the blessing of a new gate for the base, built on sacred ground. He eyeballs his old girlfriend, Tracy (Rachel McAdams), who now has two kids and a husband in the Air Force, the taciturn Woody (John Krasinski). She eyeballs Brian back. A simple offer of a drink is filled with longing and regret.

But one love interest won't do. Up trots Emma Stone's Allison Ng, a USAF fighter pilot who has been dispatched to "babysit" Brian while he's in Hawaii. If Stone seems impossibly young to 1) be flying F-22s and 2) be wooing the Coop, she nonetheless looks dashing in uniform, and she gets to be tough and swoony and play the guitar with a tribal king on a mountaintop.

Crowe lets Ng claim one-quarter Hawaiian ancestry - to show her affinity for the "myth and story" of the Native People. But like so many of the defining traits and quirky details Crowe has assigned his characters, this one is hard to swallow. (An Asian American group has condemned Aloha for its absence of key roles for Asian-Pacific Islanders. Guess they didn't hear about Stone's character's indigenous heritage.)

Along with the dueling Cooper/McAdams and Cooper/Stone love angles, Aloha offers a muddle of plot about that Air Force base blessing and some cyber-intrigue to do with a rocket launch funded by a billionaire. Bill Murray, sporting fashionable shades and spouting pronouncements to a leggy biographer (the dialogueless Ivana Milicevic), is said cad.

Danny McBride wiggles his fingers nervously as the base commander. And Alec Baldwin storms in in a fit of pique as a four-star general. He gets to call Cooper "Mr. Three-Day-Old Beard Boy" - which is easily the snappiest line in the film.

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