Bradley Cooper: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Brian Gilchrist - Aloha (2015)

As already stated, 2015 hasn't exactly been Cooper's finest year. He had trouble with Burnt (in which he played a Gordon Ramsay-like angry chef and wasn't nearly as good as Jon Favreau in Chef), but before that he also struggled along with everyone else associated with Cameron Crowe's dull Aloha. The problem is probably mostly to do with Crowe's direction: the film is insignificant and overly sentimental, never challenging any of its incredibly talented cast to actually do anything. The result is that Cooper's Gilchrist is fatally vacuous and improbably miscast: he's supposed to be a jaded burnout with war wounds, but he looks like he's stepped out of a remake of Top Gun. Cooper doesn't have the capacity to really play a burn-out, because he's not experienced it, and it feels like you go through the whole film with everyone else on the cast imagining that Brian is played by someone else entirely. Someone older, wiser and more broken than this blue-eyed GI Joe who doesn't fit the bill.