The Last Airbender

While "The Last Airbender" isn't as bad as "The Happening", mainly because Shyamalan has some source material to work with, but his screenplay fails in many other ways to produce a coherent storyline or even pretends to care about character development.  The acting is also problematic in terms of being 1-note, 1-dimensional, some of it I blame on the actors, but the directing also bears quite a bit of the responsibility in terms of the acting not supporting the story beats at certain emotional points in the film, relying on either overly dramatic line readings, or not getting enough out of the actors.  I didn't much care for the child actor, Noah Ringer, playing Aang (the last airbender), his performance just felt odd and uneven, but I sort of blame most of that on the director as well.  The rest of the cast feels like they raided Nickelodean's live actor ranks to save on actor salaries.

There is absolutely no wonder about the powers of bending any of the 4 elements (air, water, earth, and fire), Shyamalan treats the use of such bending powers like he was designing their use/display for a video game.  It robs the film of the special-ness of the characters, and just plugs the use of bending to get from plot point A to plot point B.  Speaking of the plot, the film jumps around all over the place, with characters weighted down in a lot of exposition to explain how they make leaps in their itenarary ("show, don't tell" seems to be either the lesson Shyamalan didn't learn along the way as a filmmaker, or he didn't have the budget to film such scenes).

That being said, the film moves swiftly, but to its detriment, as it doesn't get much of a chance to breathe and let the audience settle into the storytelling.  It does feel like the film has been cut up a bit since story progression suffers, and it just jumps around without enough foundation to attempt such leaps.  It becomes a messier film as it barrels towards the end, which wasn't all that satisfying, either. 

Does the film deserve the raking-over-the-coals by the critics, definitely so.  But it's not so terrible that kids won't enjoy seeing the special effects, just don't expect them to become engaged in this set of characters from the film, over the TV version of them.

I give it 1.75 stars, or a grade of C-.