rated PG

Let’s just put it on the table. This movie is wildly, painfully, spectacularly bad. Horrible, in fact. Offensive. Unredeemable. Provoking in relatively equal parts anger, confusion, pity and dismay, this travesty of a film has roughly the entertainment value of surviving a stroke—an irrational, pointless accident that dulls the senses and just may slur your speech.

Going in, we know that M. Night Shyamalan’s  latest insult (his last two, “Lady in the Water,” “The Happening” left a lingering stink sufficient to effectively occlude any success he may have had in his early career with “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable”) was proposed as an epic mythic adventure, somewhere between “Ramayana” and “The Matrix.” Going out, it’s a tossup whether it actually ranks as more of a comedy or a tragedy.

The shamelessly self-promoting writer/producer/director has stated his intention from the beginning of this project was to use the framework of the very popular Nickelodeon anime series (in which a rag-tag crew of renegades gifted with various X-powers to control, or “bend,” the respective elements of Air, Water, Fire and Dirt, fight the oppression of an evil mechanized empire) to build himself a “Star Wars” trilogy for a new generation. One has to wonder, however, bearing witness to the plodding, disjointed mess he’s coughed up here, if he has the slightest clue what made Lucas’ original trilogy work, or if, in fact, he ever even saw them. Any comparisons to “Star Wars,” beyond Shyamalan’s clear attempt to ape Lucas’ slavish embrace of Joseph Campbell’s philosophies of employing specific archetypes from traditional storytelling, desperately careen past the first three movies to collide directly into the very worst elements of Lucas’ oft maligned misfire “The Phantom Menace.”

While Shyamalan’s stagnant, exaggerated writing style certainly rivals Lucas’ for its ability to transform a terrific cast into mindless robotic drones, it should be noted that with “The Last Airbender,” Shyamalan also lacks the terrific cast. Whatever possessed him to assign comedian Aasif Mandvi from “The Daily Show” as an evil-hearted, iron-plated overlord defies all logical explanation, as does why Mandvi would bother to take such a dreadfully ill fitted gig (no offense, Aasif, but you were way better as the exasperated pizza shop owner in “Spiderman 2”). The children around whom most of the action centers may simply have been snatched off the subway. Still, it is quite astonishing how effectively Shamalyan manages to render living, breathing human beings so exceptionally less animated than their cartoon counterparts.

What we’re expected to swallow as dialogue is in fact just a constant drooling stream of unparalleled exposition. The lifeless, glaze-eyed potatoes on screen explain aloud, and in agonizing detail, everything even the dullest audience member may clearly see for themselves, delivering their universally hackneyed, ridiculous lines as though they were reading a history report in summer school, with all the emotion of a doorknob and enthusiasm of a cat chewing grass. “Did you see that bright flash of light?” one exclaims. Why, yes, we did, we were watching. “There’s dirt everywhere!” another points out. Urm, uh huh. We can see that, too. Somehow Shyamalan seems to have forgotten he wasn't hired to write a radio show. The characters’ verbal diarrhea actually continues to spout even when there’s no one else awake in the room with them to listen. As Aang, the young airbending reluctant hero, lays captured and unconscious, his enemy muses out a window, “My father always liked my sister better than me.” Yawn. You’ll wish you yourself were unconscious.

And don’t get your hopes up that the bloat of all this turgid, redundant yakkity-yak might be mitigated by the promise of some freewheeling wire-fu or the magic spectacle of exciting elemental clashes. It isn’t. Though the combat choreography makes some effort to characterize and distinguish each nation (the Firebenders are all about attack; the Water nation, fluidity and redirection of force, etc.) the fighting styles are all strictly off the shelf, almost studiously avoiding any hint of invention or imagination. With mystical powers to command the very skies and oceans, it’s a poor sorcerer who can think only to throw stuff across the room. In a cage match, these guys wouldn’t stand a chance against the Wonder Twins. Sad, but true. The special effects, by George Lucas’ old pals at Industrial Light & Magic, are nothing all too special either, seeming to have been imported straight from the 1990s, with radically unconvincing green-screen work and obvious, overwrought digital backgrounds apparently lifted directly from the company's dusty old Naboo archive drive.

As tempting as it is to make a joke here about airbending as a euphemism for fart making, in the end, it would be an unfair disrespect to the fart. Instead, let’s all just pray that, trilogy plans notwithstanding, “The Last Airbender” is exactly that, and that somebody, somewhere, please, has the power and mercy to stop M. Night before he bends again.

Originally published in The Wire.