The Last Airbender

"This is all enormously disappointing, of course, since the best we could hope for from a live-action "Avatar" adaptation is the mind-blowing equivalent of our first encounters with wire-fu, rather than this cartoony nonsense."

"Half a star for James Newton Howard’s imperious score and another for Andrew Lesnie’s lensing. But even that’s marred by muddy 3D in a film lacking any sort of dimension."

"The problem -- the catastrophe -- of The Last Airbender is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there."

"The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented."

"Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind."

"Even during the climax, the film still is struggling to introduce the world of the film and its strange rules."

"Far from the catastrophe the US bewailed, but still disappointingly clunky. Notch it between Eragon (below) and Dragonslayer (above) on a sliding scale of fantasy filmmaking."

"CHARLIE GATES is unimpressed by a career nosedive from director M Night Shyamalan."