Hilarious review of how bad The Last Airbender is

Amazing review. [Link]

Recently, at an Asian fusion restaurant, I was offered a thing called an Asiadilla. This was a quesadilla with roast duck and hoisin sauce inside it. Just let that idea sink into your mind and permeate your tastebuds — in essence, it's Beijing Duck crossed with Tex-Mex. With extra cheese. Watching The Last Airbender is like being force-fed a hundred Asiadillas, washed down with a pitcher of overly sweet Saketinis. The Asian kitsch flies at you, from the yin-yang fish to the army of Samurai who are all South Asian. You want a cheesy foreign backdrop for your fantasy epic? M. Night Shyamalan will smother you in cheese! Because the setting, in this movie, is just another trickster making fun of your desire to believe in it. Airbender's Asia is a giant pantomime, and you are Puss in Boots.

Through all of this chaos, two actors wander like lost souls, and they're really the twin poles of this undertaking. On the one side, you have Aasif Mandvi, of The Daily Show fame, who plays Commander Zhao in exactly the same way he handles the most ridiculous crap he has to say to Jon Stewart. Every line he gets, he shouts and arches one eyebrow comically, in case you didn't already know this was a send-up. (Anyone who's watched Mandvi in the TV series Jericho knows he's capable of subtlety and real emotion, so the fact that every one of his lines of dialogue in this film feels like it should be prefaced with an arch, "That's right, Jon," feels totally deliberate.)

And then there's Shaun Toub, who stands out for the opposite reason: He's an honest-to-shit actual actor, and he looks as out of place as a zebra that's wandered into an alpaca farm. You can actually watch the realization dawn over Toub's face that nobody else is doing any acting in this film, but he soldiers on, dedicated to his craft in spite of everything. Toub, who's playing the uncle of Dev Patel's tormented Prince Zuko, is the real tragic hero of this movie, as you watch him struggle to cling to his dignity as everyone around him drowns in narrative sewage.

I’m thinking I’m not going to see this.