BRIAN VINER reviews Avatar: Fire And Ash

Avatar: Fire And Ash (12A, 197 mins)

Verdict: I've had shorter mini-breaks

Rating:

There comes a point in the careers of most revered movie directors when nobody is brave enough to lay a restraining hand on their arm and remind them that 'less is more'.

Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese have both been guilty of bloated storytelling in the last few years, but James Cameron takes not just the biscuit but every packet on the supermarket shelf. His third Avatar film lasts well over three hours. I've been on shorter mini-breaks.

When a movie more conspicuously satisfies its director's ego than its audience, something is wrong. Which is not to say that Cameron can't dish up a spectacle. There are some breathtaking moments in Avatar: Fire And Ash, as we might expect of a film that reportedly cost over $400m to make. But they are not enough to stop boredom setting in, followed by despair, and a touch of cramp, and ultimately a kind of disbelieving exultation that the final credits are about to roll.

I liked the second picture in the series, 2022's Avatar: The Way Of Water, and noted at the time that Cameron cited David Lean's mighty Lawrence Of Arabia - 'good, old-fashioned, adolescent adventure storytelling' was how he put it - as a major influence.

But the greatest cinematic epics never feel artificially inflated in the way that Fire And Ash does. Seeing it in 3D, as Cameron intended, somehow compounds that sense of artificiality, even as it yields some amazing chase and fight sequences.

Avatar, the first film, a global smash in 2009, introduced the story of humans in the year 2154, with Earth exhausted of its natural resources, infiltrating the blue-skinned Na'vi tribe on the distant, mineral-rich moon Pandora.

Now, in Fire And Ash, human-Na'vi hybrid Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his pure-bred Na'vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) set out to return their adopted human son Spider (Jack Champion) to 'his own kind', the so-called 'pink-skins'.

The ensuing story obeys many of the conventions of the Western, as a fantastical sci-fi version of a wagon train is attacked by a hostile tribe of 'ash people', the volcano-dwelling Mangkwan, led by the ferocious Varang (Oona Chaplin). This bad-tempered lot capture Jake and his family and prepare them for sacrifice, but there's a distraction.

Varang yearns to understand how 'to make thunder' - in other words how to use the deadly firearms brought to Pandora by the human invaders and adopted, reluctantly, by the Na'vi. Pointy ears notwithstanding, not  to mention battles both in the sky and underwater, all this is stuff that John Ford and Howard Hawks would have recognised.

But Cameron overdoes it. The narrative becomes turgid and repetitive. Also, never mind the spirit of fire and ash that we keep hearing about, too much of the dialogue seems touched by the spirit of Monty Python. 'We do not suck on the breast of weakness,' declares Varang, which elicited a giggle from your critic, although I think respect was the intended response.

Jake's former commanding officer Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), meanwhile, seems very much of a mind to suck the breast of Varang, an unholy romantic alliance that bodes ill for the beleaguered Na'vi.

Quaritch certainly has some explaining to do to his boss, General Ardmore (Edie Falco, who should again be warmly commended for so emphatically distancing herself from her most famous role as Carmela in The Sopranos, but frankly looked a lot more comfortable in New Jersey bling than she does in military fatigues, preparing Pandora for full-scale human colonisation).

Whatever, after three hours and 17 minutes of all this, the stage is set for the fourth and fifth Avatar films that Cameron has promised us. It is a prospect to render some of us neither blue nor pink, but a little green, around the gills.

Avatar: Fire And Ash is in cinemas now.