"I'm never starting a movie again when the script is this ridiculous ... It never not even once works."
Is there really hope when that's the verdict of a movie's own producer?
The opinion of then Sony chair Amy Pascal, which emerged as part of the studio's hacking deluge last year, appears to be one of many factors dogging Cameron Crowe's new romcom-drama Aloha before it has even been released.
Out on Friday in the US, and June 18 in Australia, early reviews at best call it a "harmless miss", amid reports that "bad buzz" has killed the film off before it's even reached screens.
Written and directed by Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) it stars Bradley Cooper as a military contractor sent to Hawaii, stuck between past and future love interests played by Rachel McAdams and Emma Stone. Despite the A-list cast - backed with strong supporting ranks in Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin and John Krasinski - early reviews are not good.
One of the common criticisms waged against it appears to be an unclear plot and, as Pascal noted in her emails, "People don't like people in movies who flirt with married people or married people who flirt".
Rotten Tomatoes has so far given it a rating of 8 per cent, listing its critics consensus as "Meandering and insubstantial, Aloha finds writer-director Cameron Crowe at his most sentimental and least compelling."
Variety's Andrew Barker didn't hold back: "Unbalanced, unwieldy and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe's worst film."
He added it bears "all the telltale signs of a poorly executed salvage operation disfigured in the editing bay".
One saving grace appears to be that claims of a "white-washing of Hawaiian culture" and an exclusion of Asian Pacific Islanders, seems to apply only to the trailer, with the actual film including a plotline involving traditional Hawaiian elders.
