The Last Airbender

Talk about a good story. Talk about memorable characters. Talk about incredible fight scenes.

This movie ruined all of that. The M. Night Shyamalan film, as written by M. Night Shyamalan had promise and hype and most importantly the inability to deliver.

What started as what was, in all hopefulness, a cheesy kung-fu movie with poor dialog and cheesy kung-fu completely fell apart after about 20 minutes in when you realized they were serious.

The lines that were exchanged lacked any sort of depth, and the way they were delivered lacked any shred of emotion. It was as if Noah Ringer was chosen to play Aang merely out of his martial art abilities and his relative appearance to the illustrated version and not in any way for his acting, which failed to show at all. This didn't waver for any of the other main characters either. The feeling just wasn't there.

Now, I'm all for adapting stories and making them into your own kind of world as a retelling of a story. But when you leave out so much of the backstory that you expect the audience to already know from the series, and your actors are so misinformed that half of them pronounce words similar to the series and half of them don't even come close, you try to fit roughly 20 episodes into a timespan of 3 episodes, and a hefty majority of the lines you hear in the movie are almost carbon copies of lines from the series, than I have a pretty good feeling you're doing something very wrong.

Let's even forget that there's even a series this was based off of. Standing alone, there's no good movie qualities to it. The action sequences are dulled due to a serious lag of excitement because the fighters have to perform a martial arts dance for minutes on end before there's any sort of elemental response. The movie speeds so far along its story that it's hard to catch up with what's going on, where, when, why and who is doing these things.

You're dumped into a movie that has so much fan support that it's expected not to need any rational explanatory aspect, let alone any inkling of decent movie detail.

Oh, and the trademark Shyamalan surprise twist in each movie? I'm just waiting for him to announce to the public that this movie was a joke.

1/5 stars.

Unthinkable

Director Gregor Jordan took Peter Woodward's writings and turned it into a movie.

Which sucked.

When I first saw Samuel L. Jackson step in as Henry Herald "H" Humphries, I thought this movie was going to be so killer. So action packed, and so thriller that I was going to need a box of tissues for my eyes and my pants by the end.
I was half right.

The movie centered around an American born terrorist who has planted 3 nuclear bombs in cities across the United States, set to detonate in a few days time. The short of it is, the military captures him and is trying to get information from him. But he won't speak. The solution? Good Cop, Bad Cop.

Carrie-Anne Moss plays Agent Helen Brody, brought into the site to help determine the location of the bombs. Which she feels would be best found by asking him to tell her. Meanwhile Samuel L. Jackson reinforces the bad cop ideology by cutting his fingers off.

I'm serious. This movie is an hour and a half of H torturing the terrorist. So while this gritty torturing goes on, the movie tides us over by trying to convince us there's a struggle of philosophy waging war. The choice of importance between the lives of millions or the ethics of torturing one man. Which only spirals deeper and deeper into a fray when H drags not only the man's wife, but his kids into the torture as well.

And when the chaos finally clears and resolution is nearly in sight, right when you're ready to see how it all ends, the movie ends. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is clear. Is this deep? Maybe in bullshit.

2/5 Stars