The “atrocious” movie Roger Ebert despised on all fronts: “Agonising in every category I can think of”
While movie critics are entitled to like bad movies and trash good ones, sometimes they have to agree with the consensus and call a terrible film a terrible film. Unsurprisingly, Roger Ebert didn’t have a kind word to say about one of the worst blockbusters in recent memory, if not cinema history.
He didn’t have a bias against effects-heavy epics or high-concept flights of fancy, provided they were done well. Based on how he trashed almost every Michael Bay picture that was released during his lifetime, Ebert had certain standards he wanted his expensive adventures to live up to.
From the outside looking in, a writer and director who’d made their name on crafting original, suspenseful, and dread-laden genre stories didn’t seem like an ideal fit for a massively budgeted adaptation of existing source material, a sentiment that couldn’t have been proven more true when The Last Airbender was released.
There were already signs that M Night Shyamalan was going off the boil after The Village, Lady in the Water, and The Happening failed to come close to matching The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, but his ill-advised take on the popular animated TV series was the exact moment he went from wunderkind to has-been.
It wasn’t until After Earth that he realised he needed to step back, take stock, and return to his roots, which has worked out pretty well over the last decade and change, but even he’d admit The Last Airbender was a wretched, pitiful, unintentionally hilarious, and all-around awful blockbuster debut.
Eventually sweeping the board at the Razzies by claiming the three most unwanted prizes for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’, everybody knew long before then that it was an offensively bad movie. Ebert didn’t hold back in his review either, refusing to find any positives whatsoever.
“The Last Airbender is an agonising experience in every category I can think of, and others still waiting to be invented,” he began a 0.5-star assessment. “The laws of chance suggest 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.”
Ebert branded the 3D as “unexploited, unnecessary and hardly noticeable”, blasted the “atrocious” visual effects, and pilloried the film for being miscast from top to bottom, decrying the entire cast as “bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing”, although he did at least blame Shyamalan and not the performers.
As far as he was concerned, The Last Airbender was doomed from the second it was announced, with the critic accurately suggesting that “the first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime.” Fans of the TV series, or anyone unfortunate enough to waste money on seeing it at the cinema, would wholeheartedly agree.
Originally planned as a trilogy, if not more, The Last Airbender mercifully underperformed at the box office to spare audiences from any more, which Ebert was hoping would be the case: “I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic”.
The first was indeed the last, and everyone who enjoys cinema was able to breathe a sigh of relief.
