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Critics Consensus: The Last Airbender squanders its popular source material with incomprehensible plotting, horrible acting, and detached joyless direction.
Critic Consensus: The Last Airbender squanders its popular source material with incomprehensible plotting, horrible acting, and detached joyless direction.
All Critics (189) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (11) | Rotten (178) | DVD (3)
One is bored and stupefied by what seems like an eternity of vacuous spectacle, cod-Buddhist tosh and clunking dialogue.
Call M. Night Shyamalan a Wood Bender -- this kiddie cast is as flat and stiff as particle board
[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.
Neither epic enough to be memorable, nor disposable enough to be harmless...Think of Star Wars: Episode I without the nuance (!) and subtlety (!!).
Shyamalan is your trickster guide on a journey into nothingness, from which only your soul-dead shadow will ever return.
Airbender's editing is clunky, its pace glacial. It feels like watching someone's homemade tai chi highlight reel, if tai chi could be somehow racist.
A poor effort from a director who once promised so much.
There isn't a single convincing performance in the picture, and the badness of the acting is, bizarrely, pretty much in direct proportion to a character's importance.
The Last Airbender is not just a flop, it's a big-budget flop, and it's a throwback to that grand old genre, the movie that's so bad that it's bad.
It is no surprise that after two atrocities Shyamalan couldn't make something superior, and so, by trying to comprise an entire season of the Nickelodeon animated series into one single movie, he creates an incomprehensible narrative with pedestrian dialogue and awful acting.
Super Reviewer
Decent visuals do little to save this heavily butchered live-action rendition of the first season of Nickelodeon's "Avatar: The Last Airbender". Failing to capture the delightful humor and lovely character interactions of the show, M. Night Shyamalan's first tackle at a fantasy epic is hilariously amateurish at best (If you thought he was bad trying to be Rod Serling, then watch him attempt to be George Lucas). Not only is the plot incomprehensible to anybody who hasn't watched the show, but this piece of cinematic trash is filled to the brim with wooden acting (Dev Patel, Shaun Toub, and Aasif Mandvi are the only actors that emerge with any credibility), awkwardly stilted exposition-filled dialogue, thin characterization, and ineptly choreographed action sequences. The plot will have newcomers confused and the strange alterations from it's wonderful source material will anger established fans. My advice: stick to the TV show and forget about this heap of uninspired tripe.
Even as someone who is not familiar with the anime of the same name, you can tell that this has probably little to do with it. The set-up, world-building and idea behind this mythology is great and interesting. There are also a couple of genuinely fun action scenes, especially when the bender work with their elements. The main problem are the characters. Why do the main characters from the ice look Caucasian but everyone around them Inuit? Those two aren't much of actors anyway. Then there is this somewhat flat but often bratty main character. All that makes it hard to care for everything that's going on. The film is still entertaining and offers some nice special effects, gorgeous landscapes and cities. So the result is not as catastrophic as fans of the original may want to make you believe. It's not that great a movie on its own either, though. And the sequel the ending dares to hint at very strongly will probably never happen.
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 this was not good. I will try and watch the tv show now to see how bad the movie supposedly was.
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