'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is bent but stupid and glum

Avatar: The Last Airbender  Movie  PG      

            M. Night Shyalaman's attempt to make something better than his banal 'Lady in the Water' is borrowed from the pages of a Nick manga and cartoon, Avatar, the Last Airbender. Using post production 3 D to try and improve the green screen visuals seems to have given it some depth, but the visuals aren't spectacular and the score just meh, as the kids out there say. (The actors do a lot of staring at nothing). The cartoon was highly ambitious, a manga/animae nod that actually worked on multiple levels, and so was really impossible to make into a movie. M Night's cameo is embarrassing, again. The racial casting is all over the place. India seems to be the fire nation. America is the water nation, sort of. The Chinese implied in the cartoon are all gone, replaced by Indians. The lead, who was Japanese, is now American. His village is also. What the heck? The twist ending is stupid, but not any more cheesy than the dialog. The water city is populated by some kind of Norse Indians. Did they even try to make it match the cartoon? What's wrong with it being set in a mythical China? M Night thought something was wrong, or else he wouldn't have changed it, and the names, and everything. The acting sounds it was like badly dubbed into English, when it was clearly just a bad script. It doesn't quite get a clear star. At least at times it was funny, but didn't intend to be. Don't pay 12 bucks for it in a theater. They didn't get names right, like this one, the lead's, It's not pronounced Ung, it's pronounced Ayng! The villains might as well have had mustaches, eyepieces and canes, twiddling them and snickering.        
     Review by Adam Browne