To understand exactly what's wrong with M. Night "Still Coasting on the Fumes of The Sixth Sense" Shyamalan's painfully dunderheaded adaptation of the beloved animated series "Avatar: The Last Airbender", you need look no further than its opening five minutes. Young waterbender Katara (Nicola Peltz) magically levitates a large globule of GC water over her older brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), finally dropping it on his head. "Don't do that," he tells her glumly (I'm paraphrasing a bit here). "I always get wet," he mumbles, as though bored and mildly ashamed by his own attempt at humor. It's the last joke he cracks in the entire movie.

Following that, the two of them wander off over the frozen, icy wasteland they call home, halfheartedly searching for game to hunt while trading brief chunks of exposition back and forth in lieu of conversation. "Tiger-seal," Sokka exclaims blankly, following some tracks in the ice. We never actually get to see said hybrid beast, though. Instead, they stumble across a large ice bubble, which smashes up underneath their feet. Sokka is afraid it's some kind of "Fire Nation trick", thus letting the audience know that 1) the Fire Nation are the bad guys, and 2) Sokka is an idiot. "Katara, don't touch that sphere!" he tells her, but his clunky, unintuitive words fall on deaf ears (maybe because he's speaking with the emotionless cadence of a robot). Katara smashes open the giant ice ball to reveal a young boy and a giant shaggy white carpet with a hideous black, hairless face that we are soon to learn is a flying, six-legged bison. Could this boy (Noah Ringer) be the legendary long-lost Avatar, the one person in the world who can manipulate all four elements of fire, water, air and earth and save the world from the tyranny of the Fire Nation?

Fans of the series will recognize all of this, naturally... it's the same set-up that happens in the first episode. I'll give Shyamalan credit for at least (more or less) following the basic plot points of the first season fairly faithfully. What he gets wrong is pretty much everything else. The series worked as well as it did thanks to its deft blending of humor, drama, fantasy, spiritualism, dazzling action sequences and especially its endearing characters. Shyamalan, who professes to be a big fan of said series, appears to have watched the whole thing while laboring under the impression that while all of that is fine and dandy, what would really make the whole concept sizzle would be to take out all of the fun and wonderment, then replace them with a gloomy, self-serious sense of emotionless detachment. Take Sokka, for instance (please). In the series he is a constant source of lighthearted humor, all blustery bravado and corny puns, but in Shyamalan's take, he's so dour and serious that he appears perpetually ready to do a full-blown emo meltdown... or would, if he had any personality or dialogue that wasn't purely expositional.

Katara and Aang (which for reasons that probably only make sense to Shyamalan is constantly mispronounced as "Ohng"), the young airbending Avatar of the title, fare no better, their entire character arcs stripped of any complexity and reduced to being blank vessels for Shyamalan's single-minded determination to make everything in the movie über-serious. And honestly, I wouldn't have even been bothered by a more "serious" Airbender, except that all of Shyamalan's austere dialogue is so clumsily, painfully awful. Even in his best movies, he always did prefer his characters to speak in thick, portentous slabs of unrealistically purple verbiage, but he's downright tin-eared in "Airbender". "It was not by chance that for generations people have been searching for him, and now you have found him," mumbles one character, and you can hear the strain in the actor's voice as he tries to breathe life into that clunky mouthful. It doesn't help at all that Shyamalan, again channeling his pathological need to make everything really serious, has apparently instructed virtually all of his actors to remove any trace of passion or emotion from their delivery. Honestly, there haven't been this many stilted, mannequin-like performances on screen since "Attack of the Clones".

Shyamalan also seems to be, shall we put it kindly, at a bit of a loss as to how to stage a convincing action scene. Again, in the series the use of magically manipulated elements is a constant source of inventive, kinetic action... just imagine the coolest Jackie Chan fight scene, and then imagine how much cooler it would be with floating ice walls, stone shields, air whips and swirling fire jets added into the mix. Shyamalan, whose detached directorial style is much more suited to long, moody takes from halfway across the room, is not the first name you think of when you think of "action", and if you had a nagging doubt about his ability to pull off this kind of martial arts mayhem... well, you were right. He doesn't have a clue how to stage, choreograph, shoot or edit an action scene, nor does he seem especially interested in doing so (Aang's airbending is presented largely as sending wispy puffs of steam out of his hands, while earthbending comes across as a bunch of tai chi maneuvers that eventually, after about five minutes of waving your arms around, can make small, potato-like rocks float very, very slowly at your enemies).

Awkward, ponderous and often hilariously misconceived, "Airbender" is all the more painful to watch because Shyamalan clearly cared about the film he was making. While the story and acting are uniformly terrible, he does pull off some occasionally lovely imagery, and there are brief scenes where the film threatens to spark to life. It never does, but for once it's not because the director was too generic or "too Hollywood". Shyamalan had a vision, and he stuck to his creative guns. Regrettably, overwhelmed and incompatible with the source material, he was simply the wrong guy for the job.