The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.

As soon as I finish writing this review, I'm going to try traveling a few hours in the past. That way, I can improve my life by skipping this movie!

The movie is gorgeously filmed and contains some fascinating lore about life in northern climes. But the plot is tritely predictable and far-fetched. Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Vanessa Redgrave are among the performers who deliver less than their best.

Lange and Paltrow give it their all, but they can't save this one from plot holes, continuity mistakes, and heartlessness.

The acting is uneven and most of the romancing seems so mismatched.

Labors mightily to be a frolicsome entertainment, but the results are - well, labored. The dialogue isn't snappy, the story isn't surprising, there's little chemistry between the stars.

Larry and Andy Wachowski directed this lurid, sexually explicit thriller.

Luc Besson's screenplay is dumb, but has just enough weird touches to give occasional glimmers of interest.

What really hurts is the movie's shallow screenwriting, self-indulgent acting, and woozy camerawork.

The first Revenge of the Nerds was a pretty stupid movie. But it was partly redeemed by its genuine affection for the nerds themselves - it made us like them a lot, and you couldn't help feeling good when they came out on top. Nerds in Paradise is also a stupid movie, with more than its share of cheap vulgarity, and it doesn't do so well at making the heroes really lovable.

If you want a movie time trip, the 1960 version is a far smoother ride.

Tennant's featherweight comedy is clearly pitched at the date-movie crowd, and couples may enjoy it if they can get past the picture's simplistic ethnic stereotypes and its willingness to wish away every real-life family problem the characters will surely face after the feel-good finale.

The suspense sequences are straight from the standard Hollywood blueprint, and the movie as a whole is so sloppily assembled that it's almost incoherent at times.

Movie stars have tamed sassy kids in movies from "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Stand and Deliver," but it's hard to remember an example more patronizing or sentimentalized than this one.

This woozily uplifting saga is big on homilies and deficient in just about everything else.

If a mildly magical story is what you're after, it'll be worth the price of admission. Otherwise save your milk money for something more substantial.

Unoriginal.

Dull despite its suspense-driven story.

Four chuckles and a lively final-credits sequence are a mighty poor score for 99 minutes of alleged comedy, and the sentimental stuff is even worse.

How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?

The movie's most original features are the awfulness of the dialogue and the hamminess of Richard Jordan's performance as a Nazilike policeman. He seems to have given up on the project long before director Alan Johnson ran out of film. [28 Nov 1986, p.39]

Rarely have Gibson's tears seemed more fictional than in this supposedly authentic account of a historical event that's far too tragic to merit such superficial treatment.

Eventually you realize the whole movie has been about young showoffs who think it's uproarious to gross out neighborhood grownups.

Carpenter pulls out all the action-adventure stops, but he and coscripter Larry Sulkis forgot to write dialogue the audience could listen to without howling in disbelief.

The animation is deft but the screenplay is stilted, the voice-performances are unimaginative, and the whole project is surprisingly clumsy in its efforts to please young and old alike. A major disappointment.

Not even veteran talents like Dukakis and Scheider can surmount the artificial dialogue, arbitrary plot twists, and wan humor of this disappointing comedy-drama.

Numbingly inane comedy.

Too bad (Arnold) can't save the movie from it's superstitious clap-trap, sadistic violence, and sheer silliness.