The Last Airbender 2010

Amy Nicholson, I.E. Weekly: Call M. Night Shyamalan a Wood Bender -- this kiddie cast is as flat and stiff as particle board Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Not since Kyle MacLachlan's whispered voice-overs about the worm and the spice and the worm IS the spice in Dune has a fantasy franchise tripped all over itself trying, simply, to please a fan base while creating a new one. Read more

Mary F. Pols, MSN Movies: All the while, Shyamalan creates an ever-growing sense of 'Who cares where we are; when will this be over?' Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: M. Night Shyamalan's big-screen live-action version of the popular Nickelodeon animated TV series constitutes a form of Chinese water torture in which tin-ear line-readings take the place of drips. Read more

Tom Keogh, Seattle Times: The sprawling story is so dramatically compressed there is barely enough oxygen for relationship growth (crucial in Avatar), let alone traces of an interesting director's personality. Read more

Christopher Kelly, Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com: Who would have thought Shyamalan would come up with a movie that makes his Lady in the Water look positively sensible? Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: Where to start with this one? How about this: If any movie ever warranted a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers, it's The Last Airbender. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: While the special effects are impressive enough, M. Night Shyamalan's film doesn't make a lick of sense. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: The Last Airbender is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film The Golden Compass, a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic. Read more

Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader: The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Stiff, fuzzy-looking, cloddish and disastrous in nearly every way, The Last Airbender looks as if it could have been made by the spoiled son of a studio mogul willing to waste gobs of money. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: The Last Airbender keeps throwing things at you, but its ultimate effect is, in every way, flat. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: By specifically critical and broadly adult standards, this film is undoubtedly a disappointment, but it is disappointing in a way that its intended audience may not notice. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: The Last Airbender is a joyless, soulless, muddled mess, but the worst part of all doesn't come until the very end. That's when it makes the clear suggestion that two more such movies are in store for us. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Shyamalan takes the beloved Nickelodeon anime series and turns it into 103 minutes of overproduced, stilted nonsense. Read more

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: It's rare to see a film so choppily edited, poorly scripted and spastically directed that you can barely understand what you're watching. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: The TV show created an incredibly complex world over three seasons. This picture (the first in a proposed trilogy) tries to accomplish a year's worth of work in two hours. So we get titles and flashbacks, baldly expository dialogue and clumsy narration. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: If you thought it was bad when writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was channeling Rod Serling, wait till you see him try to be George Lucas. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: 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. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: 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. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: This colossal folly, the fiasco of the summer of 2010 - gives us all a ringside seat at the sight of Mr. "I See Dead People's" career gurgling down the drain. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: Shyamalan compresses a ton of plot exposition in every line and the resulting heavyosity is too much for the younger actors to carry. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: This is bad filmmaking and bad storytelling. It also sounds what should be the death knell to M. Night Shyamalan's career. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: I can see why Shyamalan was attracted to this material, but the results are clunky even by his recent standards. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: A dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: The Last Airbender is one of the most visually luscious and exhilarating entertainments I have seen this year, full of giddy fireworks and kinetic pleasure. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The movie has been criticized for racially inappropriate casting, but that's the least of its problems. The acting is laughable, the effects are phony, the editing is addled and the dialogue is disastrous. Read more

Christopher Orr, The Atlantic: [T]he film works so hard to explain its plot developments that it scarcely has any time left over to dramatize them. Exposition has not merely vanquished mimesis, it has burned its homes to the ground and sown salt in its fields. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: The puzzle of Shyamalan's racial casting soon becomes secondary to a much more pressing concern -- trying to follow the cluttered story. Read more

Bruce Demara, Toronto Star: Even 3-D technology can't inject a much-needed extra dimension to The Last Airbender. Read more

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: Please, Hollywood, if there's to be another Airbender movie, hand the job to some efficient hack, and not to a once mesmerizing artist who's lost his way. Read more

Keith Uhlich, Time Out: The camera swoops and the music blares, but we might as well be watching a tolerant, teeth-gritting parent filming his son's karate class demonstration. Read more

Nigel Floyd, Time Out: One is bored and stupefied by what seems like an eternity of vacuous spectacle, cod-Buddhist tosh and clunking dialogue. Read more

Scott Bowles, USA Today: He hasn't mastered the craft yet, but M. Night Shyamalan may be on to something with this action-movie thing. Read more

Peter Debruge, Variety: This is all enormously disappointing, of course, since the best we could hope for from a live-action Avatar adaptation is the mind-blowing equivalent of our first encounters with wire-fu, rather than this cartoony nonsense. Read more

Robert Wilonsky, Village Voice: This is one muddled attempt at franchise-making: confusing, drab, sluggish. (Ugly, too, if you're forced to see it in 3-D.) Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: It gets real old real fast. Read more