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Reviews for July 1st, 2010


The Last Airbender

Directed M. Night Shyamalan.



The Fire Nation sets out for world domination over the Air Nation, Water Nation, and Earth Nation, by going into war with them. Only the Avatar, who hasn’t shown up for over one hundred years, can bring world peace by using his firebending, airbending, waterbending and earthbending powers. One day, waterbenders Katara (Nicola Peltz) and her older brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) crack open a mysterious, large block of ice that they find on their icy landscape. Aang (Noah Ringer) emerges from the ice block and, as it turns out, he’s the Avatar that everyone has been seeking for so many years. The evil Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) as well as Commander Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) of the Fire Nation both desperately want to capture Aang for their own power-hungry, pernicious reasons. When Katara and Sokka learn that Aang has not mastered all of his powers, they must now go on a journey to help him learn those much-needed skills. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has taken a premise that could have been epic and thrilling in scope, but instead turns it into a painfully dull, nauseating mess that drains all of the sense of wonder and excitement from the beloved anime series which it’s based on. For those of you previously unfamiliar with the anime series, good luck trying to make sense of the plot and all of its lifeless characters. Dev Patel overacts to the point of coming across as cartoonish while everyone around him give wooden performances. Not a single character is worth rooting for, even the film’s hero, Aang, because they’re essentially cardboard characters. Each one of them lacks any kind of depth of personality or background information that would bring them to life. Adding insult to injury, the dialogue sounds stilted, awkward and inane. Shyamalan overuses voice-over narration perhaps because of all of the plot holes that he was too lazy to fill with actual scenes. Please keep in mind that, although The Last Airbender is available in 3D, it was shot in 2D and only later converted to 3D much like Clash of the Titans, so you’ll find the fleeting 3D effects to be barely noticeable without adequately enhancing your movie-going experience. At a running time of 1 hour and 43 minutes, The Last Airbender is a boring, nauseating blockbuster filled with poor editing, painfully wooden acting, unrelenting dullness, and unimpressive special effects. It’s so bad that it's gone past good and back to bad again.
Number of times I checked my watch: 9
Released by Paramount Pictures.
Opens nationwide.





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