In Review: ’Avatar: Fire and Ash,’ ‘The Housemaid,’ ‘Is This Thing On?’

Avatar: Fire and Ash
Dir. James Cameron
197 min.

James Cameron is all-in on the Avatar series and expects moviegoers to be just as committed. Anyone hoping Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third entry in the series, might ease them into the experience of watching it should reconsider those expectations. The follow-up to 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, Fire and Ash opens with characters gliding through Pandora’s skies and immediately addressing the fallout of one of The Way of Water’s most dramatic events: the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), the oldest son of human marine-turned-Na’vi chief Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and the guilt felt by Neteyam’s younger brother Lo’ak (Britain Dalton). Got that? Good because there’s a lot more characters to remember, including Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) the teenage sort-of reincarnation/sort-of child of the human scientist Grace Augustine (also played by Weaver). And Payakan, an outcast member of the whale-like Tulkuns. And human “Sky People” out to colonize Pandora. And humans who’ve been reborn in Na’vi form, like Colonel Miles Quarritch (Stephen Lang). Oh, and Quarritch’s son Spider (Jack Champion), whom Jake and Neytiri have raised as their own. Can’t forget about Spider.

It’s easy to have mixed feelings about the Avatar films, even while watching one of them. Each one has been a visual wonder built atop sometimes shaky storytelling that’s in turn rooted in an achingly sincere attempt to use science fiction to explore questions about spirituality and the nature of existence. I thought the original Avatar was a letdown in 2009, but Avatar: The Way of Water thoroughly won me over 13 years later, thanks to time spent developing the characters and a plot that complicated the white savior trope of the original. Avatar: Fire and Ash combines the best and worst of both movies. At the outset, I found myself wondering why I cared about these characters and the elaborate mythos surrounding them. By the end, I was swept up in the spectacle and the fate of the extended Sully family. But getting to that point meant traveling on a sometimes bumpy road.

And kind of a familiar road, too: Just as Terminator 2: Judgment Day hit most of the same beats as The Terminator, Fire and Ash makes many of the same stops as The Way of Water, most notably a climactic aquatic battle. As the film opens, Jake and his family are still making their home amongst the reef-dwelling Metkayina, but their peaceful coexistence soon faces threats both new and old. Old: Quarritch remains intent on retrieving Spider. New: the emergence of the Mangkwan clan, an embittered Na’vi death cult with a fondness for fire led by the sinuous Varang (a memorably villainous Oona Chaplin). Making matters worse, Quarritch and Varang form an alliance that threatens to wipe our heroes off the face of Pandora.

What worked in The Way of Water works here, just not quite as well. Despite the generous running time, some of the subplots feel rushed and truncated. The family drama remains compelling, but not quite as intense. As before, Cameron co-wrote the story and screenplay with several collaborators, including Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Shane Salerno, and Josh Friedman, but his fondness for awkward lines of dialogue remains a recognizable signature. (Spider gets the lion’s share of them, but Kiri is saddled with a true clunker of a moment.) 

Yet the film’s fundamental earnestness and Cameron’s gift for astounding visuals and kinetic action scenes usually offset most of the flaws and a nagging sense of déjà vu. Cameron’s created an enveloping world, one that he plans to remain in for at least two more films, the last of which is scheduled to be released in 2031, when Cameron will be 77. Cameron worked on an early version of the first Avatar script in 1994. That means, in case there was any question about his commitment, he’ll have spent nearly 40 years bringing the world of Pandora to life. Once again, he’s all-in, and the films’ best moments make it easy to share that passion. If Fire and Ash were all great moments, it would be even easier. —Keith Phipps

Avatar: Fire and Ash is currently in theaters.

The Housemaid
Dir. Paul Feig
131 min.

Since creating Freaks and Geeks, among the greatest one-season wonders in television history, director Paul Feig has embarked on one of the oddest careers in Hollywood. Though he enjoyed a run of first-rate, femme-centered studio comedies (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy) that ended with a feckless Ghostbusters remake, many of his other projects are like unaccountable bits of potpourri, from the Jim Caviezel-led historical drama I Am David to the twisty holiday rom-com Last Christmas to the bottom-of-the-barrel Netflix fantasy The School for Good and Evil. Feig found a little success with the spicy suspense comedy A Simple Favor—which led to a direct-to-Prime sequel, Another Simple Favor—but all the wit and personality he invested in Freaks and Geeks and those earlier projects are now a slow IV drip. The only intermittently recurring element now is a flair for bright pulp and a little feminine esprit de corps. 

Based on Freida McFadden’s 2022 novel of the same name, Feig’s new thriller The Housemaid finds him working mostly in A Simple Favor mode, which is appealingly naughty and diverting, but nonetheless aches for a more personal touch. As it stands, the film feels like a do-in-a-pinch Gone Girl cross-pollinated with the nested plotting of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and The Handmaiden, a formula for success that’s a little more formula than success. There’s an effort on Feig’s part to poke around in gender roles and the class divide, but the film is mostly a cheerfully sinister plot machine, compelling but full of loose gears and loud clanks. 

Feig doesn’t waste time in setting up a blonde-on-blonde showdown between Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, who are set up as adversaries in the drama and the dueling voiceover narration. Sweeney stars as Millie, a desperate young woman who lives in her car and fibs her way into a job as a live-in housekeeper for the Winchesters, a rich couple with a snotty preadolescent daughter. Nina Winchester (Seyfried) initially presents herself as a warm and put-together housewife who doesn’t appear to need any help, but Millie discovers on the first day that her new boss is wildly erratic. As Nina subjects her to unreasonable demands and angry tirades, Millie turns to her hunky husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) as an ally. She’s secretly on parole, you see, and cannot afford to lose her job. 

So who’s the crazy one here: The sexy parolee who’s infiltrating a swanky home like Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle? Or the high-strung power mom who turns feral over a mislaid copy of her speech to the PTA? There’s obviously an option C in the husband and mystery box D in the form of a groundskeeper (Michele Morrone) who says little and glares much. There are twists aplenty in The Housemaid, often tucked into ornate backstories that account for the characters’ actions, though Nina’s behavior never makes much sense even in retrospect. The performances, particularly Seyfried’s, keep the film popping, along with some energetic rug-pulling from Feig, who treats the material like a deadly telenovela. But at an exhausting 131 minutes, it’s an indulgent feast on empty calories. — Scott Tobias

The Housemaid is currently scandalizing theaters everywhere.

Is This Thing On?
Dir. Bradley Cooper
121 min.

Is This Thing On? tells us pretty much everything we need to know about Alex (Will Arnett) before he even says a word. While others look on in delight at the performance of a Chinese dragon dance, Alex wears an expression that mixes sadness and bafflement. He’s a man who’s lost the capacity for joy and doesn’t understand why. It’s easy to share his dismay, at least at first. His decades-long marriage to Tess (Laura Dern) has started to fall apart for reasons neither seems able to grasp. They don’t hate each other. They don’t even fight. Their two sons seem to be turning out great. Yet Alex and Tess mutually arrive at the decision to call it day. Maybe it’s just one of those things. Maybe Alex won’t ever be able to figure it out. Another option: maybe he’ll start a new hobby largely dedicated to figuring it out.

Finding himself short of the cash needed for a club’s cover charge, Alex signs up for a spot on the evening’s open-mic lineup and improvises a short stand-up set about his woes. Though it’s decidedly not a star is born moment, Alex gets enough laughs, and enough of a rush, to try again. And again and again, until it becomes a kind of secret life he lives in after-hours New York. Meanwhile, Tess attempts to decide what to do with her life after Alex, contemplating next steps that include a return to the volleyball career she thought she’d left behind, this time as a coach. Each is finding their own way to move on while still getting drawn back into each others’ orbit by parenting duties and a nagging sense of unfinished business. Meanwhile, Tess and Alex’s best friends Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper) play out their own marital drama, one in which both stay high so they can stand one another, an arrangement that doesn’t seem built to last.

Loosely inspired by the experiences of British comic John Bishop (who gets a story credit), Bradley Cooper’s third film as a director finds him working on a smaller scale than that of A Star is Born and Maestro without dialing back the dramatic intensity. It’s sometimes easier to admire the ambition than the results. For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart. The script (co-written by Arnett, Cooper, and Mark Chappell) offers intriguing glimpses at the behind-the-scenes world of stand-up’s lower rungs and competitive volleyball. But Cooper has trouble keeping the tone from wobbling—as Balls, a struggling actor, his performance often seems to belong to a much more straightforward comedy than everyone else—the logic of the way one scene follows another often feels fuzzy, and Cooper’s in-the-thick-of-it naturalism becomes wearying after awhile. Like one of Alex’s stand-up appearances, the film spends a lot of time fumbling toward punchlines that only sometimes land. —Keith Phipps

Is This Thing On? opens in limited release tonight before expanding in the upcoming weeks.

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