The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to The Last Airbender

Poor Manoj. The guy literally never saw the Shyamalashing coming from critics of his new, instantly notorious The Last Airbender, and I don't know if even his fiercest detractors ever envisioned him striking rock bottom quite as violently he has with this one. I mean, it's bad, folks. But don't take my word for it (or Kyle's, or Stephanie's for that matter). Read on for a flight of bile that makes our earlier Grown Ups and Sex and the City 2 hate-tastings sweet by comparison.

9. "There's a moment in The Last Airbender when Princess Yue pleads 'mmy people are dying, Sokka' and I instantly flashed on 'our people are dying, Senator,' Padme Amidala's very similar line from The Phantom Menace. In the halls of colossal nerd culture disappointments, I place these two films side-by-side. While the special effects and James Newton Howard's score in Airbender are quite good, I'm not sure Airbender has a podrace or Darth Maul double-sided lightsaber to argue for its side. I believe M. Night can ruin the world. -- Jordan Hoffman, UGO

8. "A film's [Rotten Tomatoes] ratings can be mixed/so-so (60% to 75%), mixed shit (40% to 60%), shit (20% to 40%) and steaming piles (under 20%). At least 11 other major releases this year have been generally condemned as time-wasters, but Airbender, so far, is the King of Shit Mountain." -- Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

7. "If any movie ever warranted a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers, it's The Last Airbender. Not because it's a terrible movie -- though it is -- but because its release as a 3D film becomes false advertising a few seconds after a comin'-atcha gush of water appears behind the Paramount logo. From there, it becomes painfully obvious --even more painfully obvious than in Alice In Wonderland -- that a few 3-D elements have been added to satisfy the current 3-D craze, and the higher ticket prices they allow. Worse still, the process makes the already-dark imagery darker, and turns the action blurry. Viewers who see it in this form will pay more for an even shittier experience than the one they would have had in 2D." -- Keith Phipps, The AV Club

6. "[A]fter his last two debacles, Lady in the Water and The Happening, you would think he'd can the hocus-pocus and settle into something a bit more, well, lucid. The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension." -- Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

5. "In the past eight years [... Shyamalan's] oeuvre has gone from bad (The Village) to worse (Lady in the Water) to worst (The Happening). Purists might argue that his last film was less dreadful than his penultimate one, but the hallmarks were the same: stilted language, robotized acting, glacial pace, ponderous style, dramatic ineptitude and negligible energy. I never meant to make this review an exercise in career assassination, but I can't help thinking of all the lavishly talented filmmakers who have earned and never gotten a shot at big-budget success. What's the secret of this guy's failure?" -- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

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

*3.** After spending the past decade making bad movies, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has branched out in The Last Airbender. He has made a really bad movie. [...] To be specific, he has made a dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest. Eleven years ago, Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense looked like the beginning of a brilliant career. Today it looks like a fantastic anomaly, like a flowerbed in an arid wasteland or some eighth wonder of the world. -- Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle

2. "The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that. [...] Not only is it unexploited, unnecessary and hardly noticeable, but it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

1. "I'm going to speak plainly in a language everyone can understand. M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is a hate crime against film lovers. No one should ever have to endure what I was unexpectedly put through yesterday afternoon watching this murky 3D shitstorm of a movie that appears to have been shot through unflushed toilet bowl water, which, upon reflection, seems 100 percent appropriate. [...] As a critic, I always try to find one or two positive things to write about every film, even for the most trying movies I see in a given year. But for The Last Airbender, I got nothing." -- Capone, Ain't it Cool News