The Last Airbender: Critic Reviews

The Last Airbender keeps throwing things at you, but its ultimate effect is, in every way, flat.

The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.

After the first five seconds, it seems as if you have been watching it for around two-and-a-half hours, and that this time has passed in four-and-a-half days.

He hasn't mastered the craft yet, but M. Night Shyamalan may be on to something with this action-movie thing.

It gets real old real fast.

The Last Airbender is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film The Golden Compass, a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

This is one muddled attempt at franchise-making: confusing, drab, sluggish. (Ugly, too, if you're forced to see it in 3-D.)

If you thought it was bad when writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was channeling Rod Serling, wait till you see him try to be George Lucas.

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.

All the while, Shyamalan creates an ever-growing sense of 'Who cares where we are; when will this be over?'

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

Not since Kyle MacLachlan's whispered voice-overs about the worm and the spice and the worm IS the spice in Dune has a fantasy franchise tripped all over itself trying, simply, to please a fan base while creating a new one.

The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan compresses a ton of plot exposition in every line and the resulting heavyosity is too much for the younger actors to carry.

The Last Airbender is one of the most visually luscious and exhilarating entertainments I have seen this year, full of giddy fireworks and kinetic pleasure.

Stiff, fuzzy-looking, cloddish and disastrous in nearly every way, The Last Airbender looks as if it could have been made by the spoiled son of a studio mogul willing to waste gobs of money.

While the special effects are impressive enough, M. Night Shyamalan's film doesn't make a lick of sense.

This is all enormously disappointing, of course, since the best we could hope for from a live-action Avatar adaptation is the mind-blowing equivalent of our first encounters with wire-fu, rather than this cartoony nonsense.

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.

This colossal folly, the fiasco of the summer of 2010 - gives us all a ringside seat at the sight of Mr. "I See Dead People's" career gurgling down the drain.

Even 3-D technology can't inject a much-needed extra dimension to The Last Airbender.

The puzzle of Shyamalan's racial casting soon becomes secondary to a much more pressing concern -- trying to follow the cluttered story.

I can see why Shyamalan was attracted to this material, but the results are clunky even by his recent standards.

This is bad filmmaking and bad storytelling. It also sounds what should be the death knell to M. Night Shyamalan's career.

Even during the climax, the film still is struggling to introduce the world of the film and its strange rules.