Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Inception” contains some of the most spectacular nonsense ever committed to film – drivel with intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Writer-director Christopher Nolan crafts a fine impersonation of a good movie, with strong, brooding performances, gorgeous atmospherics and inventive, if showy, digital effects. But Nolan is more interested in toying with his audience than telling a story that holds together, a gambit that should be familiar from his previous original screenplays, “Memento” and “The Prestige.” Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a corporate spy who steals from people’s dreams. He’s hired to attempt the more ambitious “inception” — planting an idea in the mind of a target. The genre trappings are familiar from any heist movie — a damaged hero whose only hope for future happiness rests on one last job. To its credit, “Inception” stages this material intriguingly, within an elaborate, shared dreamworld. This choice allows DiCaprio’s dead wife, played with luminous bitterness by Marion Cotillard, to supply the emotional weight. But Nolan eventually loses control, shuffling between incoherent and unnecessary action sequences, underlined by a droning, bleating Hans Zimmer score. His aim is to tantalize people into seeing the movie again, but there’s a difference between a lucid film that rewards multiple viewings and a deliberately vague puzzle picture that taunts you to make sense of it all. “Inception” is the work of a filmmaker with something to hide. Nolan hasn’t made up his mind or committed fully to his ideas — so he asks the viewer to do the hard work for him.

“The Last Airbender” was an old-fashioned turkey, easy to mock for its spectacular ineptitude and its desperate 11th-hour conversion to 3D. A week later brings a new bid to goad families into theaters, the animated comedy “Despicable Me,” about a washed-up supervillain who adopts three orphan girls. It will get better reviews. But to these eyes it’s a more insidious and depressing film. “The Last Airbender” was clueless and dunderheaded; it couldn’t help itself. The makers of “Despicable Me” know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is reprehensible. It’s a calculatingly vapid commodity, always making the lazy, obvious choices. It doesn’t entertain; at best, it distracts. It has virtually no story or likable characters, so it’s packed with throwaway sight gags, most of which ask us to chuckle at physical pain or humiliation. The French filmmakers lack vision or charm, and they wallow matter-of-factly in the coarsest elements of American culture. They make no attempt to amuse adults and children at the same time. “Despicable Me” is festooned with references that young viewers have no capacity to understand, like a shameless and pointless homage to the horse’s-head scene in “The Godfather.” On top of the violence and mild scatology, there is of course cloying sentimentality, as the malevolent if hapless bad guy is reformed by fatherhood. Of course, he only turned dastardly because his mother neglected him. The moral, then, is that parental love is a good thing, so take it to heart and spare your kids from “Despicable Me.”

“The Last Airbender” plays like the most expensive instructional tai chi video ever made. The heroes can move air, water and earth with their minds, and before they do, they often gesticulate like the congregants in a Beijing park at sunrise. Since the acting is so poor, the story so incoherent and the dialogue so wooden, they might as well turn to the camera and explain earnestly how the ancient martial art enhances their physical and mental well-being. Instead, they just do their tai chi and are surrounded by elaborate and costly digital effects. It’s not clear what the practice has to do with telekinesis. Mostly I think it’s thrown in to add some Asian flavor to this inexplicable production. “The Last Airbender” was adapted from an anime-style Nickelodeon series, but it’s about as Asian as P.F. Chang’s. The art direction, the costumes and the mythology carry Eastern influences, but the heroes are white, the villains are mostly Indian and other ethnicities get thrown in only when convenient. Paramount Pictures must be desperate for a new tentpole to throw 150 million dollars at this ragged material and entrust it to the faded filmmaking prodigy M. Night Shyamalan. His name doesn’t sell tickets anymore, and the actors are mostly unknown, so the 2D production was retrofitted for 3D, which means you wear the uncomfortable glasses but rarely notice any stereoscopic effect. It doesn’t help that the term “avatar” is crucial to the plot. “The Last Airbender” was intended as the first chapter of a trilogy, but like “The Golden Compass,” it may endure as an embarrassing standalone.