Memo to M. Night Shyamalan: STOP making horrible movies!!! Though I was initially unaware that The Last Airbender is actually based on the popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, which ran on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, I though that as a summer movie, the concept for this film still seemed pretty cool and had definite potential. Making a film about warring factions with the ability to manipulate the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air, all based on source material with dedicated fan-base? Pretty hard to mess that up. Unfortunately, the task of bringing this cartoon to life was left to M. Night Shyamalan, who, with the exception of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, has almost consistently delivered critical and financial disappointments to the movie-going public. Though it is not all that surprising, Airbender might actually be Shyamalan’s worst film, and if I hadn’t made the resolve to review the full movie, I might have walked out of the theater a half-hour into the film.
Again, Airbender was based on an established and successful cartoon, but rather than produce a faithful adaptation, Shyamalan (who also wrote and produced the film) mars the source material with painfully-bad acting, laughable dialogue, and sub-par special effects. Sometimes a director can be forgiven when one considers that he was working with a bad script, only problem is that, in this case, Shyamalan has no one to blame but himself. Such a script might have worked for a cartoon, but when it comes to the standards of film, Airbender insults the audience’s intelligence with a barely coherent narrative. Apparently Shyamalan planned Airbender as the first of a trilogy, and I will be shocked if he is able to find anyone willing to back him financially after word of this train-wreck spreads. Bottom line, don’t sacrifice your time or dignity by seeing this piece of trash, it is the worst film I have seen this summer.
For more information, please read full review.
Overall Recommendation: Very Low
