Film reviews: Is This Thing On? has many parallels to Hamnet
Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett in Is This Thing On? (2025)
★★★★☆
Volleyball and standup comedy might not have the cultural cachet of Shakespearean tragedy, but (15A), in which Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern) belatedly call time on their 20-year marriage, runs along a similar groove to Hamnet, in which Shakespeare creates timeless art by channelling his grief at the death of his young son. Here, drifting aimlessly through a midlife crisis, Alex — stoned on a stolen marijuana cookie — stumbles on-stage at a standup comedy venue and starts venting his frustrations; stilted and mumbling, wholly unprepared, Alex nevertheless discovers that his raw, unfocused ramblings about his failed marriage strike a chord with the audience.
Meanwhile, Tess, formerly a volleyball star with the US national team, returns to her first love, and finds that she has an unsuspected vocation as a coach.
Written by Will Arnett, Mark Chappell and Bradley Cooper, with Cooper directing (and co-starring as the self-absorbed wannabe actor Balls), pursues an unusual narrative arc.
Where we might expect Alex and Tess to bicker and spit fury at one another, the pair’s first concern is for the wellbeing of their young sons Felix (Blake Kane) and Jude (Calvin Knegten).
Indeed, the split is amicable to the point of stripping the script of conventional drama, and instead leans into a more mature and satisfying story of how two people can adapt to new circumstances — Alex learning the standup comedy trade from scratch, Tess finding joy in coaching rather than playing — when everything they have known has been ripped apart.
Will Arnett and Laura Dern are terrific in the lead roles, both understated as they tease out the nuances of learning to love themselves on their own terms, while Cooper provides a sharp contrast to the essential goodness of the main characters with his hilariously egotistical and permanently pie-eyed Balls.
★★★☆☆
(16s) opens with Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returning from college with her friends Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Nick (Benjamin Chang) to the remote Hawaiian home where her father, the author Adam (Troy Kotsur), has raised the highly intelligent chimpanzee Ben from birth.
Ben is ‘part of the family’, and can even communicate via sign language and a primitive technology, which only makes it more shocking when Ben, having been bitten by a rabid mongoose, turns feral and starts savaging his human ‘siblings’.
Johannes Roberts’ horror-thriller might well be saying something interesting about the dangers of trying to tame an instinctively wild creature — the underlying theme is effectively the triumph of nature over nurture — but for the most part is a relentless sequence of scream-chase-kill as Ben, deranged by rabies, develops a predilection for ripping off human faces.
Fans of gore will certainly get their money’s worth, but the story really has nowhere to go other than the inevitable showdown between Lucy and her beloved Ben.
★★☆☆☆
(15A) stars Jason Statham as Mason, an ex-Royal Marine living as a hermit on a small Scottish island who is forced to re-engage with the world when he rescues teenager Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) from drowning.
By doing so, however, Mason — once a highly-trained assassin with MI6 — alerts his old colleagues to his whereabouts, setting in train a breakneck tale in which Mason takes on all comers as he seeks a safe harbour for Jesse.
Written by Ward Perry and directed by Ric Roman Waugh, delivers an impressive body count as Jason Statham reprises his schtick as a gravel-voiced one-man army.
Statham valiantly plays his part as the reluctant hero, but this is implausible even by the standards of the genre: Despite its rapid pace and many shootouts, the story is a ploddingly predictable affair, and one for the Jason Statham completists only. Bill Nighy, playing a shadowy MI6 puppet-master gone rogue, really needs to have a serious word with his agent.
- All theatrical releases
