The Last Airbender (PG)
For many years now M Night Shyamalan has been intriguing us with his devastatingly original takes on sci-fi, horror, adventure and drama. It's a shame he's 'gone' Hollywood with this latest venture which is ill-suited to his talents and represents, I think, a cowardly move from an 'indie' director suffering from a crisis of confidence.
After the heady success of films like The Sixth Sense and Signs, etc., Shyamalan was riding the crest of a wave but his last two films (Lady in the Water and The Happening) have faced something of a critical backlash. In such circumstances it's perhaps not surprising that he would find it hard to say no to a $150 million budget for this adaptation of an animated TV series that ran from 2005 to 2008.
Noah Ringer plays Aang, a 12-year-old avatar who has the ability to control (or 'bend') all four elements, as opposed to individual controllers of air, water, earth and fire. Aang has been in suspended animation for a century, during which time the Fire Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) and his tribe have been trying to suppress the other element-ary benders in their respective regions.
Zuko has been exiled by his father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis) but if he can capture Aang and bring him back to Ozai alive, that exile will end. Aang, along with a huge bison-like creature, is rescued from his suspended animation by Katara (Nicola Peltz), a waterbender, and her somewhat less efficient brother (Jackson Rathbone) so that he can restore balance to the world and defeat the tyrannical Fire Lords.
Aang left home when he learned that his spiritual mission had the downside of him not being able to have a family life. To this extent his as yet imperfect skills need to be improved by Katara. There follows a succession of adventurous exploits which you can watch in 2D or 3D but sadly, for all their balletic grace and occasional brilliance, the whole thing fails to measure up to anything more than - sorry - a kind of fish and chips Spielberg.
Shyamalan's idiosyncratic instincts are inhibited as a result of being shoehorned into a mechanically epic formula. What we get is a re-tread of the kind of thing his cinematographer Andrew Lesnie already essayed in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Judging from the final moments, the film is about to spawn a sequel. In such a scenario, I would strongly advise Mr Shyamalan to hand over the reins to somebody better suited to the purpose. The film fails to catch fire (pardon the pun) due to the leaden-footed pace, the unnecessary voiceover and a series of action sequences that seem culled from films like Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon.
What we're left with is so many figures on a very elaborate landscape but little human interest, with the possible exception of Patel (he of Slumdog Millionaire fame) who manages to exude a certain depth of character sorely lacking in the rest of the cast as he strives for acceptance by Ozai.
Working in broad brushstrokes as he does here, Shyamalan betrays the very thing that used to make him so compelling - his dexterity with dark nuance, even if such nuance was on the big scale. (I hope that doesn't sound like a contradiction)
The joke used to be that a Shyamalan film without a surprise was in itself a surprise. Sadly, that pass has been reached here as he punches below his weight to jockey for position on Tinseltown's ever-changing totem pole.
You shouldn't send a man to do a boy's job.
