THE LAST AIRBENDER – m. night shyamalan – 1.9 / 10

As easy as it is to hate on every Shyamalan film since Unbreakable (Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, The Happening) there’s always at least one moment in every movie that makes you sit up and take notice, one moment that makes it clear that despite his inability to string together two coherent lines of dialogue, Shyamalan nonetheless has visual style to burn. In The Last Airbender that sequence is a fight scene, shot in a single take, that depicts an occupied village rising up as one and throwing off the chains of oppression. It’s a powerful shot both because of what it represents (the single unbroken take has the effect of uniting the villagers in their struggle, bringing them all together to reveal their true potential) and because it’s just really cool looking. Unfortunately that shot only lasts one minute; the other hundred and nine are a complete mess.

Trying to recap the plot of the film is beyond pointless. Besides, all evidence seems to suggest that no one involved in the making of The Last Airbender understood what the hell it was about either. But in order to talk about it at all, some background is, unfortunately, needed. There are these four nations, see, and each of them can manipulate one of the four elements. Every once in a while, an avatar is born who can control all four elements. The Fire Nation, because they’re capital-E Evil, sets out to kill anyone who can possibly be this avatar (which means killing everyone in the Air Nation because legend has it that the avatar will be born into the Air Nation). Of course, even though they manage to kill 99.9 percent of the Air Nation, they miss the Avatar, a nine-year-old kid named Aang (Noah Ringer). So Aang and a couple of his buddies from the Water Nation set out for revenge, or something.

Most of that actually sounds like a decent set-up for a big silly summer action film. But for some reason that’s pretty much the whole film. The thing moves so slowly and takes so long to get anywhere that by the end of the movie, Aang has only mastered two of the four elements (presumably so he can learn the others in the sequels) and fought one tiny skirmish against the Fire Nation. The whole film is set up. It’s like if a movie set out to tell the story of the American Revolution but ended after the battles of Lexington and Concord.

That’d be okay, I guess, if any of this were interesting. And maybe it would have been if not for the woeful dialogue and the impossibly awful cast. I hate to criticize child actors who don’t really know any better, but when your whole movie hinges on the performance of one kid (ahem The Phantom Menace), that kid better know how to act. And when you’ve changed the ethnicity of that character (in the cartoon on which this film is based, Aang is Indian while here’s he’s Caucasian) supposedly because the kid you’ve cast is so terrific, he’d better be, you know, terrific. Noah Ringer, unfortunately, is Jake-Lloyd-as-Anakin-Skywalker bad. Sure the awful dialogue doesn’t help, but the kid has no screen presence. Every time he's called upon to cry out in anguish for his dead brethren, I looked away out of embarrassment. It’s not pretty.

Everyone in the Fire Nation is a bad guy but the firebender the film spends the most time with is Dev Patel’s Zuko. Personally, I thought Slumdog Millionaire was a stinking turd of a film but Patel was perfectly serviceable in it.  And I really liked him in the British TV series Skins (which is definitely worth a look if you're interested in a teen soap that's actually got some emotional heft). Here, though, his acting’s on par with what you’d expect to find in a high school production of Death of a Salesman. He’s clearly foundering and becomes increasingly difficult to watch.

The whole damn thing is, in fact, difficult to watch. It’s not aggressively awful in the way of something like Transformers 2. Nor is it mean-spirited and hateful like The Blind Side (even though it does have a touch of that film’s casual racism). It’s just really amateurish and kinda pathetic. And the last scene, which lays out the plot of a potential sequel, is so delusional (in thinking that enough people would pay to see this garbage as to warrant another chapter in this saga) that I just felt bad for it.

As always in a Shyamalan film, there’s a moment that hints at what the director might be capable of. But that moment is so fleeting and the rest of the film so bad, that instead of hoping he’ll finally pull it together and make something great, I’m now hoping someone will just put the guy out of his misery. When he was the toast of the town in the late nineties (Oscar nominations, huge critical and commercial success, his picture of the cover of Newsweek under the headline: The Next Spielberg), I really hated him (even while kinda liking Unbreakable). And as his career went off a cliff in the mid-00s, I confess to enjoying a certain amount of schadenfreude at his expense, writing gleeful screeds against the nonsense that was The Village and The Lady in the Water. But now I just feel sorry for the guy. He’s so clearly lost touch with reality that nothing he puts on screen resembles anything like real life. Someone needs to take away his typewriter and camera before he makes a complete fool of himself.