The Last Airbender

An enjoyable blend of sweetness and silliness, with loads of giggles and just enough dark-edged humor to keep the adult companions interested (the Bank of Evil, where Gru seeks financing for his schemes, carries a small-print legend above its grandiose portals: “Formerly Lehman Brothers”), “Despicable Me” ranks as the second-best digital-animated family film of the summer. But when the gold medal belongs to “Toy Story 3,” there’s no shame in that. And unlike every other 3-D film I’ve seen since “Avatar,” this one actually uses the technology with grace, daring and a sense of wonder. After the disgraceful gray smear of “The Last Airbender,” that’s wonderful to see. (Unlike that film, and “Alice in Wonderland,” and 2010′s other “up-converted” films, this one was actually made in 3-D, and the difference is obvious.)

Improbably enough, “Despicable Me” ought to make Universal Pictures an instant player in the realm of family-oriented digital animation, up till now dominated by Pixar and DreamWorks. Mind you, Universal didn’t actually produce this film, but in French animators Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud and their fledgling Illumination Entertainment studio, they picked the right subcontractor. If Coffin and Renaud’s images don’t possess the fanatical level of detail and nuance found in Pixar’s films, they’re clear, brightly colored and often very funny. I’ll never think of the oodgy, slimy Squid Gun, a weapon pioneered by Vector (Jason Segel), Gru’s irritating, über-nerd rival, without chortling.

Furthermore, while “Despicable Me” doesn’t even try for the complicated emotional tone and quasi-Proustian yearning of “Toy Story 3,” its quotient of pure fun is at least as high. There isn’t much doubt, right from the beginning of “Despicable Me,” that Gru’s evilness is highly exaggerated. He’s far too kind to his army of Minions, cute little yellow guys who look like a cross between light bulbs and cough drops, and far too frightened of his own pet, which is never identified but looks something like a furry, terrestrial version of one of those scary, toothy, deep-water fishes. Needless to say, when a trio of orphan girls turns up on his doorstep hawking cookies (their ringleader, preteen Margo, is voiced by Miranda Cosgrove), Gru is absolutely petrified.

It turns out, however that the girls and their baked goods may offer Gru a way into the impregnable fortress of Vector, the spoiled and pompous new-school villain who’s driving old-line entrepreneurs like Gru out of business. There’s a nonsensical story going on here about Gru and Vector’s rival plans to shrink the moon and steal it — Vector’s already got the Great Pyramid of Giza in his yard, painted blue to blend in with the sky — but all of that’s just an enormous MacGuffin. The real story, of course, is about Gru’s not-so-stony heart turning to mush as his utterly cynical adoption of the spunky gals turns into the real thing.

Carell gets a lot of help from Ken Daurio’s consistently amusing script, but he brings tremendous complexity to a character who could easily have been a one-note, Boris-vs.-Bullwinkle gag. Gru constantly marvels at the insipid and hackneyed nature of parental love, but marvels even more at his own inability to resist it. When coerced into reading the girls one of those board books where you stick three fingers into little puppets, to become kittens drinking their milk or brushing their fur or whatever, he exclaims: “This is garbage! You like this?” But by the end of the movie, after the girls and Minions have helped him through a ludicrous lunar showdown with Vector, Gru has written his own icky-cute board book, and a hugely sweet “aww” moment it is too.

Along with Segel as the immensely smug Victor — who gets what’s coming to him, don’t you worry — “Despicable Me” also features Russell Brand, Kirsten Wiig and Julie Andrews (!) in relatively low-impact roles. You can argue that all this movie does is remix a bunch of familiar themes, tropes and gags from other family-oriented films. But Coffin and Renaud’s execution is fresh, sincere, often lovely and a great deal of fun — and in this kind of movie, and this kind of movie summer, execution is everything.

At least that’s how I remember them. With this formula having reached the point of diminishing returns several movies ago — certainly by the ludicrous “Lady in the Water,” if not all the way back to “Unbreakable” — Shyamalan has now sought therapy for his addiction, in the form of making the most thoroughly predictable story you can imagine. Adapted from a popular children’s animated series, “The Last Airbender” is a generic mishmash of themes, images and ideas drawn from a long list of quest narratives and science-fiction classics. It’s a little bit Tolkien, a little bit Lucas, a little bit “Matrix,” a little bit “Dune” and rather too much Philip Pullman, all stuck together with some powerfully expensive effects and lots of cute kids doing tai chi.

I can see why Shyamalan was attracted to this material, but the results are clunky even by his recent standards. What we’ve got here is a completely acceptable rainy-Saturday time-waster for kids — to whom the jumbled collection of clichés and archetypes presumably won’t seem so third-hand — pumped up to the level of unsustainable grandiosity thanks to Hollywood’s economy of stupefaction. With a reported production budget of $280 million, and the inevitable post-production “up-conversion” to murky, light-robbing 3-D, “The Last Airbender” is meant to be a franchise-launching worldwide phenomenon. Maybe it’ll get there; I claim no expertise in gauging public taste. But Shyamalan spends so much of the movie trying to dazzle us with bigness and self-importance that he forgets to tell a good story. Or much of any story, really.

This is one of those movies where the plot can’t just happen; it has to arrive at your door like a series of singing telegrams. We’ve got an opening text-crawl right out of one of the bewildering, second-string “Star Wars” films, written in pseudo-ancient prose full of phrases like “amongst all the peoples of the world.” There’s voice-over narration every so often, from a young semi-magical “Waterbender” named Katara (Nicola Peltz), along with on-screen titles letting us know we’re now in the “Northern Air Temple” or “Fire Nation Colony 15″ or wherever. Even with that, every scene in the movie involves more yakkety-yak explication — what happened to some people we don’t know about, a long time ago, to set up what’s happening now — just so we can limp along to the next CGI action sequence.

See, there once was peace, love and understanding amongst all them peoples, who are divided into four semi-rivalrous element-based clans: the Air Nation, Water Nation, Fire Nation and Earth Nation. There is one transcendent leader called the Avatar — he gets endlessly reincarnated, after the fashion of a Tibetan lama — who keeps these nations at peace, but he disappeared a century ago, and the steampunkish Fire Nation, rocking a Nazi-Mordor Industrial Revolution ethos, is bent on conquering the world. Katara and her brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), members of an isolated Water Nation outpost, find a little boy frozen in the ice. He’s the missing Avatar, naturally — last survivor of the all-but-exterminated Air Nation — and they set out to save the world. If that sounds like a pile of spoilers, uh, no. That’s what I learned in the first 10 minutes of the film, before I began exercising my own magic powers and writing shopping lists with my mind. Did my wife say laundry detergent or dishwasher detergent?

As Aang (played by 12-year-old Noah Ringer), the Avatar discovered in the permafrost alongside his faithful fuzzy flying companion — it’s like a giant Ewok, cross-bred with Mothra — begins to assume his full powers, the effects budget takes over the movie, which definitely raises both the “wow” factor and the pure silliness. Aang can go into spooky trances, with what looks like a light-up One Way arrow on his head, where he seeks advice from a dragon-spirit in a misty cave. As a born Airbender, he can summon impressive windstorms, and the insufferably New Age priestly caste of the Water Nation will soon teach him their Zen-psychotherapy approach to controlling the wet stuff as well.

Despite the Internet uproar launched by some fans of the animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (which was going to be the title of this movie, until, uh, other forces intervened), I have to say that the racial controversy around this movie is overblown. It’s true that Shyamalan has cast white actors as the principal protagonists (although Aang’s race and color are ambiguous), and no doubt marketing concerns played a role. It’s also true that he depicts the charismatic villains of the Fire Nation as South Asian in appearance (and Shyamalan himself was born in India). Indeed, the only truly interesting or complicated character in this whole movie is the Fire Nation’s exiled Prince Zuko, played by Indo-British actor Dev Patel (star of “Slumdog Millionaire”). Katara and Sokka’s Water Nation is depicted as a mix of white and Central Asian or Inuit people, while the Earth Nation’s people, although barely seen here, are East Asian in appearance.

With Katara, Sokka and Aang holed up in the Water Nation’s icebound northern stronghold, the Fire Nation’s nefarious Commander Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) arriving with a vast, smoke-belching navy, and tormented Prince Zuko skulking around the margins like the freelance Gollum-type he is, “The Last Airbender” cranks itself up to a lumbering, impressive — and no doubt monumentally expensive — final battle scene. But I never get the feeling that Shyamalan is much interested in this clumsily rendered narrative or its characters. “The Last Airbender” feels like hackwork — gorgeous and elaborate hackwork, at times — and as crazy as some of Shyamalan’s movies have been (well, OK, all of them), he’s never been guilty of that.

It may not be accidental that Zuko, the boyish Indian prince cut off from his own people and bitterly alone, is the only character in “The Last Airbender” who seems to possess an individual personality. He’s trying to navigate complicated ties of blood, honor, mystery and magic, while everybody else stands around explaining the past, declaiming platitudes and occasionally kicking some ass. For kids and tweens who loved the Nickelodeon series, the latter qualities may be enough. But even though great acts of magic are performed and great sacrifices made, etc., it’s all instantly forgettable. Except for Zuko, sitting alone in a cafe mourning what he has lost and can never get back, looking as if he can see dead people.