Director M. Night Shyamalan’s name is all over the promotional materials for The Last Airbender.  It’s appropriate.  After all, he is the film’s director and, despite his last few flops, he is still a very popular director.  Still, promoting this movie using his name is a felonious case of false advertising.  The quality of the film does accurately reflect the quality of half of the director’s previous movies.  Unfortunately, it’s not the good half.

The story takes place in a spiritual fantasy world populated by nations that take on the characteristics of the four major elements: earth, fire, water, and air.  A select number of each tribe are gifted with special powers to control their respective elements.  These certain few are called “benders.”  In every generation there exists one special individual called the Avatar.  The Avatar has the rare gift of being able to bend all four elements.  He is charged with keeping the peace.  Unfortunately, as this movie opens the Avatar has been absent and the world has devolved into chaos.

In the Avatar’s absence, the fire tribe has asserted its dominance over the others: destroying cities, stealing artifacts, and imprisoning benders.  With their father off to war, two young members of the water tribe stumble upon the long lost Avatar who has been frozen all this time.  Due to the freezing, he has remained a young boy who still hasn’t learned to control the elements outside of air, having been born into that tribe.  With the help of his discoverers, the Avatar attempts to learn the ways of the water benders while seeking advice from a spirit dragon as to how he can stop the fire tribe.  Meanwhile, leaders of the fire tribe seek to capture and destroy the Avatar so their dominance may continue.

Based on the animated television show fully titled “Avatar: The Last Airbender”—the first part was dropped for obvious reasons—this is also the first movie Shyamalan has directed that wasn’t based on his own original idea.  Having never seen the television series, I am unable to discern if he was successful in maintaining the feel of the original, but the end product does feel like something that belongs more on Nickelodeon than the big screen.

This starts with the cast, many of whom seem more like kids playing pretend in the backyard than like professional actors.  This may seem a harsh comment to make about a cast so young, but we’ve seen much better performances by young actors; in fact, one only need to look at the movies on Shyamalan’s resume for multiple examples.

As for the older actors, Dev Patel is whiny and out-of-place in his first big screen role since Slumdog Millionaire.  Still, the worst piece of casting is by far that of Aasif Mandvi as Commander Zhao, the film’s main villain.  Mandvi is excellent as a correspondent for The Daily Show, but he draws too many unintended laughs to be the baddie in a would-be summer blockbuster. The only standout in the cast is Shaun Toub as Uncle Iroh.  As the wise sage, Toub grounds every scene in which he appears.

This movie also lacks the quiet visual flair that Shyamalan achieved in his earlier films.  Instead, the movie is filled with lackluster action sequences and underwhelming special effects.  The result is a movie that feels more goofy and childish than it is intending to be.  There’s even one should-be-serious moment that reminded me of a clip I recently watched from one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies that came out in the early nineties.  Certainly that is not the intended tone of The Last Airbender.

All that being said, there is one question about this movie that I just can’t answer: will its target audience be satisfied?  My guess is yes.  There is a lot going on and some silly humor that should delight younger viewers.  Also, based on the few clips I’ve seen of the television show, it appears the movie does a fair job of bringing characters, creatures, and familiar objects like the Avatar’s glider to life.  There’s just not enough there to satisfy the older viewers who are looking for a quality fantasy adventure this summer season.

The Last Airbender is rated PG for “fantasy action violence.”  As much of the fighting is done with water and air, there’s no gore and little else to scare away anything but the most squeamish young viewers.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of The Last Airbender.