Not bent, just broken

Stick a fork in M. Night Shyamalan, because he’s done. After the creative dive-bomb that is “The Last Airbender”, Shyamalan has dig himself a hole his past successes can’t dig him out of.

Based on the Nickelodeon cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” it is the story of people who can bend the four elements to their will, and the child Aang who must master all four to save the world from the villainous Fire Nation.

The dialogue is stilted, forced and disjointed, and feels like it was originally written in Chinese, then badly translated.

Shyamalan clearly hasn’t the first clue about how to pace a movie outside of the horror genre. The film’s breakneck pace mangles a confusing plot and forgoes any development that would attach the audience to the characters. Scenes will often change mid-conversation, and on-screen action is inexplicably substituted with unnecessary narration.

Featuring great special effects and lots of martial arts but loaded down with bad actors and frustratingly incompetent storytelling, the movie is great until the actors open their mouths. (There’s a reason there’s no dialogue in the trailer.) Shyamalan has positively squandered the huge potential of fantastic source material in a stinker that is almost certain to ruin whatever credibility he still had.