Is there any man in Hollywood who more perfectly represents the downfall of an ego than M. Night Shyamalan?
He started out great with “The Sixth Sense,” which was so strong people were calling him the next Steven Spielberg. He followed that up with “Unbreakable,” a fascinating take on the classic superhero plot that, while not quite as good as “Sixth Sense,” was still way above par.
Since then, with the exception of 2015’s “The Visit,” the Shyamalan catalogue has been nothing but pain and misery. It’s hard to define a low point among the hours of dreck, but odds are it is contained somewhere in “The Last Airbender.”
Based on the similarly-named beloved cartoon series, Shyamalan cleaved the word “avatar” off of the title to avoid comparisons to a certain James Cameron movie about blue cat people that came out just a year before. Ultimately, it was probably for the best they changed the title. After all, if you’re not going to maintain the integrity of the show, why bother keeping the name?
Starring a bunch of child actors so terrible they don’t merit naming, “The Last Airbender” challenges “Rocky V” for the title of Most Thorough Desecration of a Classic. Alongside them is a woefully miscast Dev Patel, playing badass firebender Prince Zuko. Patel, who you may know from his sweet performance in “Slumdog Millionaire,” fails massively when asked to play a hardened bad boy like Zuko.
This movie has many, many levels of failure, but the casting is up with the biggest of them all. In the original series, the show had clear Asian influences.
The movie’s heroes, however, are all white people, and the villains are Indian. Since Shyamalan himself is Indian-American, calling this racist is a stretch, but it’s definitely more than a little strange.
It wasn’t just the character design, it was the fact that the show was so deeply rooted in Eastern culture and mythos. The basis in martial arts, the spiritual teachings embodied by many of the characters and many other aspects get completely ignored by this dumpster fire of a movie.
Instead, we are confronted by cinematic incompetence on a scale difficult to imagine. The combination of bad acting and bad writing on display is frankly staggering, as Shyamalan’s complete misunderstanding of the universe kneecaps the movie’s potential from the starting line. It takes the confident, powerful characters from the show and devalues them to such a degree that they are nearly unrecognizable.
Katara is a good example of this. In the show, she is a strong, confident young woman who has a kind heart but is also deeply powerful. In the movie, she becomes a shrill, weak, obnoxious character who bears about as much resemblance to her animated counterpart as I do to a supermodel.
While some movies of this quality can at least be entertaining in how horrible they are, “Airbender” is just miserable. It degrades a classic series, and is also terrible in its own right. It flies right past the “so bad it’s good” moniker and nosedives into pain.
