I know what it’s like to be dead. I know what it is to be sad. ‘Cause you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born…

Newsday‘s Rafer Guzman: “Imagine a candlelit dinner prepared by a top chef and served on the sands of a sparkling beach. Now imagine that the dinner has been boiling on the stove for something like two years and you’ve got Aloha, [which has] been overcooked into an unidentifiable, inedible mush. Aloha is one of those films whose characters behave and speak so irrationally that they no longer make any human sense at all.”

Variety‘s Andrew Barker: “Unbalanced, unwieldy and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe’s worst film. Paced like a record on the wrong speed, or a Nancy Meyers movie recut by an over-caffeinated Jean-Luc Godard, the film bears all the telltale signs of a poorly executed salvage operation disfigured in the editing bay.”

Seattle Times‘ Moira McDonald: “Well-meaning but nearly unwatchable. Where’d you go, Cameron Crowe?”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Shari Linden: “With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand. As with another major miss by the writer-director, 2005’s Elizabethtown, the new film has the awkward feel of a repository for everything but the kitchen sink. The chemistry is mostly forced, the story without an emotional core. And though Crowe’s facility for language can be striking, here it never moves beyond self-consciousness.”

Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern: “I’ve never seen a movie quite like Aloha. That’s meant neither as praise nor as a backhanded compliment; it’s offered more in the spirit of one hand clapping. Cameron Crowe’s romantic comedy means to be cryptic for a while, or at least challenging to decode. For longer than a while I found it baffling — who were all these attractive people talking all this frothy talk?”

Movie Nation‘s Roger Moore: “Cameron Crowe fans — and that includes most movie critics — have cut him a lot of slack over the years. Our love for Say Anything, Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire made us embrace the big romantic gestures and little traces of heart in Elizabethtown, Vanilla Sky and We Bought a Zoo. But Aloha is a breaking point, a movie that makes you start to see the guy as just, well, full of it. Whatever it was going to be — and editing has been a Crowe problem since Elizabethtown — Aloha has been reduced to a shambling, lurching Hawaiian comedy full of big name actors making long, rushed, declamatory speeches.”

Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday: “Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe’s Aloha a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched. [This is] such an inchoate mess, such a forced, insular, self-pleasing misfire.”