Reviews are in, DO NOT SEE ‘The Last Airbender’
Every once in a while a film comes along that binds everyone together with one common purpose. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is having this effect as moviegoers worldwide unite to hate on this flick. Critics are sifting through their thesauruses for odious adjectives to accurately describe just how bad they think this movie is and it’s quickly becoming a contest among reviewers to see who can write the most scathing review.
In the spirit of fairness I will first present to you an official trailer for the film, which is based on the Nickelodeon animated television series Avatar: the Last Airbender:
Now on to the brutality that is the overall critical opinion of this film. As of this post the composite score at Metacritic is a painfully low 25. For a reference point another summer dud, Marmaduke, is currently graded at 30. The following are just a handful of reviews from major publications across the U.S.
Keith Phipps for The Onion (The A.V. Club):
The Last Airbender isn’t that much different from the rest of this summer’s generally dire multiplex fare—from The A-Team to Jonah Hex—which started with established properties and half-decent ideas, then cranked up the volume, velocity, and effects to the point where neither sense nor tender moments could escape. But it is remarkable in one respect: It’s the worst of them.
Roger Ebert for The Chicago Sun-Times:
“The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.
A.O. Scott for The New York Times:
It’s all pretty silly, and handled with unrelenting solemnity. But that in itself is neither unusual nor fatal. The problem — the catastrophe — of “The Last Airbender” is not in the conception but the execution. 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.
Scott Bowles for U.S.A. Today:
The film has come under fire from some Asian-American groups for not using more Asian stars. Ringer is white, while the cartoon characters were Asian. Airbender’s problem, though, is not in race. It’s in the script, written by Shyamalan. It can sound wooden, particularly when he calls on an inexperienced Ringer to deliver soliloquies to incite rebellion. And for a first film, Airbender seems oddly set up for a sequel, particularly considering it’s going to get its brains bashed in at the box office by The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, also out this weekend.
The last reviewer was the critic who liked the film more than any other major reviewer listed via Metacritic! Words found in the above reviews include but are not limited to; wooden, inexperienced, clumsy, long-winded, catastrophe, agonizing, half-decent and dire.
I do see one positive coming from this film. We now have yet another word for flatulence: an “airbender.”
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