REVIEW: Please, God, let this be 'The Last Airbender'

Shortly before the release of his film “Signs,” Time magazine heralded writer/director M. Night Shyamalan as “the next Spielberg,” a moniker that has proved to be something of a millstone about the neck of an artist whose films since then have met with nothing but exponentially mounting contempt.

Taking a break from his twist-prone suspense thrillers (and the critical drumming that followed wherever they went), Shyamalan turned for the first time to an established and beloved quantity — the Nickelodeon cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” But like gravity, the law of diminished returns is nearly unassailable. I sincerely wish it weren’t so, but the only thing I see is a career whose promise was long since spent.

The world of “Airbender” is divided into four kingdoms — air, water, earth and fire — each with very special individuals who have mastered their native elements and can manipulate them with their minds.

But the Fire Kingdom is bent on total domination, and knowing the reincarnated messiah called the Avatar — who can manipulate each of the four elements equally and bring balance and harmony to the war-ravaged universe — will be born an Airbender, has launched nothing short of complete genocide to ensure he never sees the light of day.

But when 12-year-old Aang (Noah Ringer), frozen in suspended animation for more than one hundred years, is freed, he reveals he is the reincarnated Avatar, a responsibility he does not covet. However, with the world crashing down around his ears, Aang has little choice but to cast aside his personal desires and lead the resistance.

“The Last Airbender” is a colossal disappointment. Narratively clumsy and dreadfully sloppy, the film is like an intoxicated man, drunkenly lurching from place to place, never settled or steady on its feet. Though endowed with a grand, miraculous mythology, the film carries no weight, emotional or otherwise. Sure, it has some impressive visuals — Shyamalan’s camera does sweep around a lot — but it has no heart or soul to match. At times it feels as if Shyamalan is trying to achieve the grandeur of “The Lord of the Rings,” or evoke the sort of overarching Eastern mysticism found in “Star Wars.”

But Shyamalan has next to no eye for action. Most of the time, he takes the lazy way out, settling on wide-angle shots in which he simply tracks the combat from left to right, the way someone who’d never held a camera a day in their lives might be tempted to stage it. It doesn’t help that, as with “Clash of the Titans,” the use of 3-D actually harms rather than elevates the viewing experience, making for hopelessly muddled, underwhelming visuals that are too dark most of the time to even enjoy.

Language has never been Shyamalan’s strong suit. But rather than see “The Last Airbender” as a fresh start worthy of professional collaboration, Shyamalan insisted on penning the screenplay himself.

The result is a hackneyed, laughable script, a hybrid of pretentious, elevated language and jarringly pedestrian colloquialisms. These words — a large segment of which are delivered via lame narration and a barrage of pointless title cards — are set in the mouths of actors so wooden and so amateurish as to incite chuckles of derision throughout the audience. Most of these actors are Caucasian, jarringly set among a sea of diverse Asian ethnicities.

And whose dim-witted idea was it to cast “The Daily Show” contributor Aasif Mandvi as the lead villain?

“The Last Airbender” is intended as the first of three films, but unless its admittedly significant fan base turns out in ravenous droves, the trilogy will most likely be cast aside like “The Golden Compass” and other franchises whose cost-benefit ratio was deemed insupportable. Let’s hope this truly is the last “Airbender.”

GRADE: D+

The Last Airbender

Cast: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi, Cliff Curtis

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Theaters: Hollywood, Tinsetown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark

Rated: PG (for fantasy violence)

Running Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes