By DAN VINTON
If there’s one thing The Last Airbender does well, it proves any mystique surrounding M. Night Shaymalan is gone. With this coffin-bound nail, all residual goodwill The Sixth Sense director retained from followup successes like Unbreakable, Signs and even the creepy but fatally flawed The Village has been throttled by his is own hands.
Shaymalan’s latest, (based on the 2005-2008 Nickelodeon cartoon series I’ve never seen), builds a likable, tactile, genuinely fascinating and lushly art-directed world of mishmashed fantasy/Asian mysticism where unique, element controlling tribes seek Aang, a lost kid who must find himself before he can bring them all together. Along the way, Aang is aided by a couple white kids and and an unexplained floating Wampa-thing that looks like Falcor‘s fat, lazy cousin– all while being pursued by angry members of the warmongering, machine-making Fire Clan.
The story follows a traditional theme undermined and sabotaged by offputtingly miscast high school amateur hour “actors” (including Twilight‘s awful Jackson Rathbone and Slumdog Millionaire’s still-wet-behind-the-ears Dev Patel) who force ear-punishing dialogue in cringe worthy combos in story progression unseen since Barney & Friends. And while a third act showdown between armies of fire and ice picks things up a bit and the action is kinetic and interesting enough to warrant some moderate thrills, the movie collapses against the traveshamockery of its mutton-fisted, amateur and ultimately uninvolving first 70 minutes.
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