After making his third film The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan quickly developed a reputation as a master storyteller with a penchant for delivering the unexpected in his twist endings.  He followed The Sixth Sense with the unconventional superhero film Unbreakable and the alien suspense thriller Signs.  After that, Shyamalan’s career itself had an unexpected twist: his movies started to suck.  The Village built some tension early on and then squandered it with long boring scene after long boring scene before dumping a pretty obvious twist on at the end.  Lady in the Water exchanged plot twists for an overly complicated plot.  Shyamalan egotistically cast himself as the writer whose work will save the world and (as possible revenge for the negative reviews of The Village) included a scene where a film critic is fatally mauled by a wolf monster.  Then came his next movie, The Happening, which started with an interesting premise for a straight-up blood-and-guts horror film and squandered it with a meandering snore-fest that had minimal blood and guts.  The promise of his late 90s success had been tarnished.  So his next step?  Adapting the successful animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (three guesses why “Avatar” was dropped from the film’s title).  Can cinema’s disgraced former master of suspense redeem himself with someone else’s material?

A quick prologue explains that there are four nations dedicated to the elements.  Each of these nations has people who can control, or “bend,” those elements.  There is a prophesized one called the Avatar who will be able to bend all four elements and will unite all the peoples, as prophesized ones so often do (um, except that Anakin kid in Star Wars).  The latest Avatar disappeared about a century before the events of the film.  Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone of the Twilight “Saga”) are a brother and sister from the Water nation who find Aang (newcomer Noah Ringer) frozen in ice.  Through quick exposition we discover that he is the last of the airbenders (which I kind of guessed from the title) and is in fact the missing Avatar (which I guessed from the cartoon’s title).

Does this all sound interesting?  It kind of is or rather would be in the hands of better storyteller.  The cartoon has quite a following so I assume it’s not bogged down by awful acting and clumsy stilted dialogue.  The film has a story that needs to be told on an epic scale.  Shyamalan clearly had the budget to tell an epic but didn’t focus anywhere near enough on the screenplay.  Many plot elements are not explained and what exposition is given is presented in dialogue so inorganic to the situation that you almost wish it was just left unexplained.  The Katara character seems almost to exist for little more reason than spout lines every so often to explain things.

The villains in this story are the ruthless Fire Nation ruled by Fire Lord Ozai, played by Cliff Curtis (Three Kings, Sunshine).  Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) plays Ozai’s exiled son Prince Zuko.  Zuko was disgraced and cannot return home until he captures the Avatar.  His temperament is fiery (ha-ha, get it?) and he is held in check by his uncle Iroh, played by Shaun Toub (The Kite Runner, Iron Man).  Aasif Mandvi plays Admiral Zhou, Zuko’s rival in finding the Avatar.  It seems a little too easy to have the Fire guys be the villains but the movie isn’t huge on originality.

The acting in the film is almost universally awful.  Actors like Dev Patel and Cliff Curtis who have proved themselves talented in other films are phoning in one-note performances to this movie.  Shaun Toub is the only actor who manages to preserve his dignity with some subtlety.  It’s hard to recognize that Aasif Mandvi is even trying to act.  He uses the same sort of cocky voice he always uses during his segments on The Daily Show.  There was some controversy prior to this movie about the fact that while the characters on the animated series were all Asian, the initial casting call for this movie was primarily for Caucasians.  While Aang, Katara, and Sokka are all played by white people, the main concession to ethnic diversity seems to be in the Fire Nation.  They’re all played by dark-skinned actors (Curtis is Maori, Mandvi and Patel are Indian, Toub is Iranian, and actress Summer Bishil is an American-born Saudi).  I’m not sure casting all the villains as dark-skinned is really the way to mollify cries of racism…

Noah Ringer is a young student of taekwondo who sent in an audition tape to Shyamalan’s studio.  Something in that tape convinced Shyamalan that he was the kid for this part.  I’m somewhat curious as to what exactly that special quality was because absolutely none of it is apparent on the big screen.  He does the martial arts well but real actors can always be trained to do that.  Hell, Keanu Reeves learned kung fu.  I don’t particularly want to badmouth a little kid who is getting his big break but there seems to be no particular technique to his acting.  When he’s supposed to be feeling anything he pretty much just yells.  Perhaps it is unfair to blame him, however.  More accomplished actors fare just as badly in this movie.  When an actor is bad in a movie, bad acting is usually to blame.  When an entire cast is bad in a movie, the culprit is usually bad directing.  Perhaps young Mr. Ringer will have some better guidance in his future endeavors.  From some half-assed Wikipedia research, I learned he will be appearing in Jon Favreau’s upcoming Cowboys & Aliens.  Favreau’s demonstrated a pretty strong capability in dealing with actors so there’s hope for this kid yet.

Visionary director Terrence Malik has had a career spanning forty years.  In that time he has made four (soon to be five) films.  There’s a lesson there.  Maybe going twenty years between directorial efforts is extreme, but it shows you can take time to fully develop your vision.  You don’t have to rush off and make every little movie that pops into your head.  M. Night Shyamalan, after spending some time paying his dues, experienced a lot of success very quickly.  He must have felt the pressure to sustain that momentum because he just kept churning out movie after movie and the quality has dipped each time.  I still hope he really works hard and develops something on the same level as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.  But as for The Last Airbender?  It blows.

Well so much for that…  I’d heard good things about the series and the trailers looked not-awful but they can’t all be winners.  At least I didn’t have to sit through another Twilight movie.  But I am fully cognizant that I am skipping the largest release of this week so I will compensate by delivering an article later today on vampires who suck less (um, or possibley more maybe?) than the sparkly pussies in Twilight.  As usual: mini-reviews here, twitter here.  Next article will be posted at 6PM.  Until then…