Average Rating: 2.8/10
Reviews Counted: 175
Fresh: 11 | Rotten: 164
Despite flashy special effects, The Last Airbender squanders the potential of its popular source material on an incomprehensible plot, laughable dialogue, and a joyless sense of detachment.
Average Rating: 2.8/10
Critic Reviews: 32
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 30
Despite flashy special effects, The Last Airbender squanders the potential of its popular source material on an incomprehensible plot, laughable dialogue, and a joyless sense of detachment.
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Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 284,156
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Suspense auteur M. Night Shyamalan takes a break from crafting original screenplays to tell this tale of a 12-year-old boy (Noah Ringer) who provides the last hope for restoring harmony to a land consumed by chaos. In a world balanced on the four nations of Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, people known as the Waterbenders, Earthbenders, Firebenders, and Airbenders have mastered their native elements. Though the masters can each manipulate their native elements, the only one with the power to
PG, 1 hr. 43 min.
Action & Adventure, Kids & Family, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Jul 1, 2010 Wide
Nov 16, 2010
$131.6M
Paramount Pictures
All Critics (175) | Top Critics (32) | Fresh (11) | Rotten (166) | DVD (5)
[T]he film works so hard to explain its plot developments that it scarcely has any time left over to dramatize them. Exposition has not merely vanquished mimesis, it has burned its homes to the ground and sown salt in its fields.
Stilted dialogue, wooden acting, glacial pacing, cheesy special effects, tacky-looking sets, ugly costumes, poorly staged and edited action sequences, all shown in murky, cut-rate 3-D.
A dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest.
M. Night Shyamalan's big-screen live-action version of the popular Nickelodeon animated TV series constitutes a form of Chinese water torture in which tin-ear line-readings take the place of drips.
Please, Hollywood, if there's to be another Airbender movie, hand the job to some efficient hack, and not to a once mesmerizing artist who's lost his way.
The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.
This is a kid's movie that doesn't seem to realize that it's a kid's movie.
Bad acting, overstuffed exposition and running time far too brief for the amount of plot shoved into it reduce The Last Airbender into parody of a big summer film as Shyamalan manages to hit every single fantasy film pothole.
The Last Airbender is swollen with portentous mumbo jumbo and realized in the most simplistic and mundane ways imaginable.
The Last Airbender is a horrific mish-mash of genres that follows a depressingly large number of dead ends in adapting its source material.
Kiddie-strength action scenes drag the film down, but the kiss of death is Shyamalan's gratuitous use of earth tones and the general dull, drab look of the film. ... drastically reduces the intensity of the 3-D effects
An amateurish mess.
Is it a masterpiece? Oh god no, but... I'm intrigued to see where the next film goes...
The constant references to 'benders' can't help but elicit sniggers from British audiences ... the plotting is stodgy, the dialogue stinks and the acting is wooden.
As an exercise in making conservation fun it makes you want to eat a McDonalds, set fire to the packaging and laugh in defiance at the film's lumpen, patronising tone.
As far as children's entertainment goes (and it is children's entertainment), it could be a lot worse.
The film is an unmitigated disaster, a putrid patchwork of the original series stitched together by wretched performances, bad creative decisions and a story that's all exposition, no depth.
Mere words can barely describe the sheer inanity on display.
...provides no drama, no suspense, and no excitement; just a series of almost random actions. (Blu-ray Edition)
It's a nice movie to look at, as long as you ignore the characters, plot, and action.
It seems as if a good film could be made out of The Last Airbender's tale. But this is not that film.
The characters are completely uninvolving, the narrative incomprehensible for the most part, and the performances seem to reflect the bewilderment of the plot.
Why do the water tribe have so much difficulty defeating their fire opponents when the battle takes place on the ocean?
Unspeakably bad dialogue delivered by excruciatingly bad actors in a plot so illogical and stupid it kills unicorns.
Never having seen the tv show i can say this. It was not a bad movie. Wasnt great just interesting. I like fantasy type stuff so this was a good show for me. A pretty unique story thanks to the tv show ive been told. But supposedly the director did not capture it. NOW knowing many people who did watch the show. I hear
June 29, 2010Super Reviewer
M. Night Shayamalan made a mistake by making this horribly terrible storyline.
March 24, 2012Super Reviewer
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