Review #3 THE LAST AIRBENDER (2010, M Night Shyamalan)

 

* 

The latest in a long line of Avatars must master all four elements and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the other ones.

Starring  Dev Patel, Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Cliff Curtis

Written by  M Night Shyamalan

Produced by  M Night Shyamalan, Sam Mercer, Frank Marshall   

Duration  103 minutes

Oh boy. I was dreading this one. Sure, because I knew its dire reputation, but even if it was supposed to be good, I still would have struggled.

I just can’t take this fantasy stuff seriously. Mostly because it tends to take itself so seriously, with all the tedious world-building and mythology and ‘lore’, not to mention the conversations between characters who sound like robots whose vocabulary comes from assimilating The Complete Works of Chaucer.

But hey, maybe for me with my lowest of low expectations it might end up being alright? Or at least so bad it’s good?

Er ...

Let’s start with the positives, shall we? Well, everyone seems to have learned their lines. It’s in focus. The guys in post clearly patiently waited out the time it took for all the CGI to render. The boom never sneaks into frame (although with this many special effect shots they probably ADR’d the entire thing). Um ... it's nice to see Dev Patel coming so far since Skins? Cliff Curtis is in it?

Meanwhile, the film’s issues are well documented: tin-eared dialogue; rushed and muddled storytelling; wooden acting; controversial casting; a dreary solemn tone; excessive narration; little adherence to the source material, too many sub-plots scrapping for attention; a bizarre disconnect between what people are saying and doing and what is going on around them; shoddy 3D from a hasty post-conversion.

But for me, the trouble can be summed up with two words: ‘exposition overload’. LAST AIRBENDER is to exposition what ROCKY IV is to montages. Every scene is someone explaining what has, is or will happen. I kept expecting exposition about the scene that just ended – and hey, maybe that did happen, since I lost track of what was going on after about 10 minutes.

More transportive for me than any of the otherworldly vistas or supernatural happenings was the constant use of the word ‘bender’. Here, it refers to someone who can telekinetically manipulate one of the four elements (fire, water, earth, air). But I kept having aural flashbacks to its use as a juvenile insult thrown around in the South London playgrounds of my childhood, alongside the likes of ‘arsewipe’, ‘derr-brain’, ‘window-licker’ and ‘your mum’s had more 1-ups than Mario’.

It seems harsh to judge young actors too stringently, but hey, they’re playing an adult's game, probably getting paid adult wages, too. And there is a scale: at the top, you have Anna Paquin in THE PIANO, Jodie Foster in TAXI DRIVER, that kid from KRAMER VS KRAMER. At the bottom, you have the lead boy in LAST AIRBENDER.

Poor Noah Ringer sounds like he grew up with THE PHANTOM MENACE’s Jake Lloyd as his acting role model. Marlon Brando could get away with reading from offscreen cue-cards in THE GODFATHER because he was Marlon Brando; here, it sounds like Ringer is having his dialogue read into an earpiece by someone with limited literacy. Some scenes consist of him shot in uncomfortably tight close-ups spouting stilted lines at an older boy and the girl who went on to marry Brooklyn Beckham, with the latter two sporting fixed wide-eyed expressions that suggest sheer disbelief at the drivel infecting their ears.

LAST AIRBENDER is adapted from an apparently popular TV show that had ‘Avatar’ in its title, but they had to drop the word to avoid confusion with Jim Cameron’s mega-hit. Turns out it could have really done with some crumbs from that $1 billion pie, even if they only came by virtue of The Asylum-style accidental viewings (SNAKES ON A TRAIN, TRANSMORPHERS, PARANORMAL ENTITY, etc.)

Look, I’m not an M Night hater; if anything, I’m an M Night apologist... to a degree. That degree includes THE HAPPENING, OLD and THE VILLAGE, the criticisms about which I accept, but I nevertheless still enjoy those titles on their own bonkers terms. But this generosity does not extend as far as LADY IN THE WATER, AFTER EARTH and, now, this hot mess.

Bend yourself in whatever direction necessary to avoid watching, even if you risk snapping something off.

One star out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  He’s certainly the latest airbender, but if somewhere in all that exposition it was clarified that others will not be following, I must have missed it.

What would a movie called THE FIRST AIRBENDER be about?  There’s an Avatar Wiki (of course there is), which helpfully tells us that it was a flying bison. Seems obvious, now.

Previously:  GOON: LAST OF THE ENFORCERS  

Next time:  THE LAST DUEL

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com