Much like lying down on the job, following the crowd gets a bad rap.
If you're down in the subway waiting for a train and suddenly everyone starts running for the stairs, you should probably start running, too. At best you'll avoid getting devoured by the hordes of were-snakes released when the MTA dug too greedily and too deep. At worst you'll find yourself in a crowd around Justin Bieber.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Following the crowd is a basic survival strategy, which also explains why it's so damn boring. Much more exciting to blaze new trails, to risk humiliation by stopping short and yelling "Hey, dummies! You're going the wrong way!" Well, I'm not going to do that here. I'm going to stick with the masses. Why? Because The Last Airbender just plain sucks.
Noah Ringer, the boy born to maintain balance between the wielders of the four elements, has been trapped inside the ice for years. The Fire Nation has taken advantage of his hundred-year absence to consolidate power and oppress the peoples of the other elements.
Released by young Nicola Peltz and her brother, Ringer begins a rebellion while he learns to harness the powers that could restore peace. But he's hunted by Dev Patel--prince of Fire Nation, exiled until he can capture Ringer for his father.
Really though, that doesn't begin to account for the plethora of betrayals, machinations, shoehorned love interests, training sequences, and abbreviated battles. The Last Airbender performs the impressively crappy feat of cramming a whole season of the cartoon into 100 minutes of film.
The result: so much naked exposition and summary you may as well be reading a Wikipedia entry. Instead of, like, seeing Ringer lead a grassroots rebellion against the Fire Nation, we get an inspiring speech that's brief even by Hollywood action standards, a poorly choreographed skirmish, and then a boatload of narration telling us just how much ass they all went on to kick.
As for the prodigious backstory, it's exposed with all the subtlety of a gorilla masturbating under the table where you're trying to do your crossword. Characters are constantly reminding each other of things they already know, be it the circumstances of Patel's exile or their own history. "Your son died in that battle last year, didn't he?" they basically say. "That must suck!"
All this is made even worse by writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's ridiculous insistence that his actors turn in performances like dead trees. I don't know why he always wants his actors to deliver their lines as flatly as a steamrolled flounder. All I know is it's distracting and awful. It's like watching a Samuel Beckett play that's an epic fantasy and also that I hate.
Honestly, Shyamalan's whole style is at odds with The Last Airbender. His static, formal framing is interesting in horror movies, but is rather less appropriate in an action-adventure movie where kung fu wizards punch each other with bricks of ice. Like, all the way less appropriate. There are some fights where people are literally just standing there. I'm sure the precise point where they're standing is compositionally significant, but it's hard for my intellect to appreciate that when my gut is bellowing "Hey, jackass, you know what your friend is fighting for right now? His life. Maybe you should help."
Not that it even matters, because every plot point is either compressed into a dramaless explanation or comes out of nowhere (and/or makes no sense). Who then gives a damn whether any of these people live or die? It's too bad, because now and then you catch flashes of an imaginative, moving story, the same way you might catch flashes of value after your kid's done digesting a jar of change.
Once all the characters stop running around explaining to each other what just happened, what happened a 100 years ago, or what's about to happen, things finally come to a head for the requisite Big Battle. At long last, The Last Airbender holds still for long enough to approach coherency. If 10 percent of a good movie is all you're looking for, attend away!
Grade: D
