Last Airbender

In the final moments of The Last Airbender one of the bad guys qualifies a task given to an underling as “unspeakably important.” That such a phrase made it through script rewrites, shoots, edits and finally past all kinds of movie bigwigs tells you everything you need to know about this film.

It is transcendent in one respect. There is not a single line of dialogue in this film that is not bare-faced exposition, as if M Night Shyamalan were expensively realising a thought experiment in which characters may only narrate exactly what they are doing.

The acting ranges from the unacceptable to the inexplicable. Assif Mandvi appears to have been cast so that he could recreate his pretend-delayed-via-satellite responses on The Daily Show, only this time in scenes with ostensible dramatic import. It takes a certain majestic directorial incompetence to achieve such exquisite comic timing.

And then there's Jackson Rathbone.

At the heart of the movie's myriad problems is the realisation of the central conceit. The logistics of bending the four elements makes for incredible boring cinema. The Last Airbender is filled with long, long sequences of people doing the Macarena really, really slowly. It takes such a long time to fight anyone, it's like watching a turn-based RPG.

Among Shyamalan's achievements here are to have made a lovingly crafted world into a lazy rent-a-mythology; an intelligently plotted story into a series of barely credible threats. But his chief achievement is time travel: the movie takes around seven or eight hours to watch but when you leave the cinema apparently only 103 minutes have passed in the outside world.

To be clear, this is a movie in which the word “bender” is bandied about repeatedly (including memorable lines such as “openly practising bending”), there is a giant beaver which nobody pays any attention to and where at one point someone sports a hairdo that looks exactly like a penis.

The only legitimate response to this is to hunt M Night Shyamalan down and smash his brains out with an ice pick. The only worry is that this won't stop him making more movies.

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