If M. Night Shyamalan sold his soul to the devil for the success of “The Sixth Sense,” I think His Satanic Majesty has finally collected in full with “The Last Airbender,” the writer-director’s mind-numbingly dreadful live-action adaptation of a popular animated TV series.
Shyamalan, whose films have gotten progressively worse over the past decade, finally hits rock bottom here — 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 fiasco has deservedly generated advance criticism for hiring Caucasian actors to play leads that were portrayed as Asians in the TV show and pitting them against darker-skinned bad guys. But that’s only the beginning of the problems with this utterly misconceived fantasy, which is reported to have cost about $150 million.
For that kind of money, actors who re-record dialogue should at least be required to match their mouth movements. And the movie should be more than marginally coherent for those unfamiliar with the Nickelodeon series. (Tweets suggest its fans at early screenings hate the movie.)
The film revolves around Aang (Noah Ringer), a 12-year-old who’s thawed out after spending nearly a century in a glacier (audiences may feel the same way at the end of the movie). The last in a long-ago slaughtered race of airbenders — he can use air as a weapon — Aang is also the latest in a long line of dalai lama-esque avatars charged with “bringing balance” to the world.
But first Aang has to learn how to also bend water, earth and fire as weapons — and stop the firebenders who killed the other airbenders from destroying the waterbenders, as well. Or something like that.
This basic story line was played out over the TV series’ first season — the couple of episodes I watched had an offbeat charm — but in Shyamalan’s inept hands it’s easily the worst of the many overplotted, would-be fantasy franchises launched in the wake of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter.”
Not helping matters at all are Aang’s teenage companions on the quest: a waterbender played by Nicola Peltz and her hunky brother (Jackson Rathbone, also featured in “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse”), who look like they escaped from a road company of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
The evil firebenders are led by poor Cliff Curtis, who repeatedly has to remind his minions not to kill Aang because “he’ll just be reincarnated.”
The biggest name in the cast, the wonderful Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire,” is perfectly awful and looks miserable as Curtis’ whiny son — something for which I think we have to give Shyamalan special credit.
It all anticlimaxes with a boring, confusingly filmed attack on a city of waterbenders — and the hunk’s ho-hum doomed romance with an insipid local princess we barely get to meet.
There’s also a promise of at least two sequels that I feel fairly certain will never get made. Two minutes in, it’s frighteningly clear “The Last Airbender” is on a fast track to the same crowded franchise graveyard as this season’s “Jonah Hex,” “The A-Team” and “The Prince of Persia.”