The Last Airbender at its best is just another summer flop left in the 2010 graveyard to die. At first thought that sounds terrible, but is it really? This movie season has offered us everything on a stick, from iron men to men in tights, but we’re just not biting. These flicks are setting up for sequels we didn’t ask for; just give us our money’s worth and we’ll be happy. That’s what it’s come to, a matter of not wasting hard-earned cash dollars on an art form we’ve dedicated our lives towards. Movies are meant to be so much more than that, and Last Airbender is at times just another stick in the mud, unnerving. Then again, on the heels of lesser disappointments, it almost literally bites you in the a*s for having the slightest bit of faith in its adapted antics of cartoonish tomfoolery. For M. Night Shyamalan, the flick’s screenwriter, director and producer to make even a decent comeback after 2008’s soul-crushing The Happening; Airbender is laughing at you. When in reality we’re the ones laughing at it. Shyamalan’s 2010 debut proves that after many years of wonder he has indeed been, not has become or turned into, a filmmaking hack.

The run-down of Airbender, based on the short-run Nickelodeon anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender, is the mojo of an evil Fire Nation. The universe has been divided into four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Each group has its own ability to “bend” its source material for use as weapon or coming-together. The Fire Nation has run the Air Nation into the ground, finished dividing the elements and has caused a war over their sole dominance. It’s there when Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz), two Water-benders, stumble upon an ice block with Aang (Noah Ringer) and his beast Appa frozen at the center. Aang is the “last airbender”, strung in the pick for over 100 years as his elders and kin have unknowingly died before him. What the rest of the world can only hope now is for Aang to unite the elements and to storm away the Fire Nation, defeating the evil Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) and his daddy issues with one stone. Shyamalan strips away all emotion and absurd humor, two things which created the cartoon series’ lovable nature, and piles on excess amounts of ridiculousness of which the like I could spend a century pointing out and still never be done with.

Mind you when I bring about the excess of the movie I’m not referring to any added-on layers Last Airbender suffocates beneath. For some bizarre reason Shyamalan feels as if there was not enough already to work with off the Nick cartoon, when in reality he had a whole lot. Like every summer “blockbuster” (we’re still waiting for the receipt on that) this year Airbender’s main reason of existence is to make globs of money and more, many more sequels. On a budget of a reported $250 million ($150 million production, $100 million on marketing alone) one could easily see why there’d be something before this. There was never any faith behind its fans or to create an audience anew; I refuse to believe it. One sight of Shyamalan’s The Village or The Happening could easily grant you with such insight. Airbender though, is his absolute worst; the final decline of his vanishing film career. More than ever a thin plotline is stretched to the brink of destruction, where the main motivation is to somehow get from start to finish. Of the many problems with Shyamalan’s movies lately, the fact there’s never much of a middling ground has to be among the top of the sort.

Long gone are the days where Mr. Twist (just a nickname I’ve grab-bagged) chose to watch over his movie from the get-go, his Sixth Sense existence where there were a rhyme and reason for everything. I don’t know where any of these character actors (nix Slumdog Millionare’s Dev Patel as Zuko) came from, and I hope we never make note of them again. It doesn’t so much pain me to admit how much I inexplicably despise The Last Airbender and M. Night Shymalan for slowly murdering the animation’s primary wonderment, as it does to even bring the idea about. Airbender is a character-driven movie that nourishes on depth and plot, people we believe we should be caring for.

Everything from the Fire Nation’s unjustified reasons for driving the other elements to depletion, or what made the Water Nation so “good” toward its people (each Nation explored feels as if it were on a constant loop), The Last Airbender is proof we’ve finally hit rock-bottom. And what a better way to finally watch it die than Shyamalan’s credibility defecated upon so literally by a property with such promise, to not have anything or anyone putting their grubby hands all over it where it wasn’t remotely welcome. Forget Clash of the Titans, for nothing we’ve received thus far this year, no Lovely Bones nor any Grown Ups, has been so terribly visually designed, screen written, or poorly directed as the warmed-over abortion been cooked up for us here.

100% SKIP IT.