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I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast · Bob Zerull

Avatar Bro

·1 hr 39 min·4 clips
Sean Patrick and Jeff Lassiter open by joking about being in the room together instead of on Zoom. That turns into comic relief fast, including nose-picking jokes that only work because they know each other so well. The housekeeping follows: Facebook, Twitter, Vocal.media, Medium, JeffLassiter.com, JeffLassiterPopCult on Instagram, and the usual block-the-trolls routine. Then the talk drops onto Avatar and stays there. One of them says he does not even hate it. That is the problem, because mediocre can be worse than bad when a movie is built to feel like an event. He keeps talking about how long it feels, not how long it is. Halfway through a three-hour run, he thinks he is only an hour in. That is the whole waiting-room joke in one breath. The movie has money all over it, and they never miss that. They just do not care. What keeps missing is heart, or anything that feels like actual human need instead of expensive motion. One comparison casts the film as a perfectly built computer: nice work, but not something anyone wants to sit and watch assembled. Another line lands on filler with no killer, which is exactly the shape of the complaint. They also start hunting for a single character name they can actually remember. That becomes its own punchline when the answer never arrives. The riff widens into James Cameron, The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan, and the joke that Shyamalan could probably make this Avatar better than Cameron could make his own version. By the end, they pivot to the movies they can still rally around, including One Battle After Another, The Life of Chuck, Sinners, and Megan. The closing stretch keeps the show’s loose, slightly deranged rhythm, where one running bit about Megan keeps pulling the conversation back in.

As heard by us

A blunt roast of Avatar that keeps landing because the hosts never let the gripe drift.

Avatar Bro is a blunt, joke-first takedown of Avatar, and it settles into the same complaint over and over: the movie feels like work, and the hosts keep waiting for it to turn into something worth the effort.

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Why you'd press play

If Avatar feels like a three-hour waiting room, this is your pod.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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