The British Are Laughing At The Last Airbender For A Whole New Reason

American audiences have had their fair share of laughs at the expense of M Night Shyamalan and his latest dud, The Last Airbender. Be it the badly rendered 3D, the horrible acting or poorly written dialogue, there was plenty for the crowds to laugh mockingly at. The British, as it turns out, have yet another.

British audiences have been getting a kick from the film and its over use of the word "bender." Why? Because "bender" is British slang for "homosexual." From The Guardian's review:

At the cinema showing I attended, the British crowd reacted derisively at key dialogue moments. One wise old lady says solemnly to a young man: "I could tell at once that you were a bender, and that you would realise your destiny." One character tells another wonderingly: "There are some really powerful benders in the Northern Water Zone."... And so on, for almost two hours. Each time, the response from the auditorium was deafeningly immature, and brought many of us to a state of nervous collapse.

Making the situation even funnier is that one of the film's principal actors, Dev Patel, is British, but didn't tell Shyamalan about the double meaning because the word was "too integral to the movie" (Digital Spy)

Perhaps I am taking a bit too much joy in this, but one also has to realize that egomaniac Shyamalan recently made a big deal about his "European sensibility." The real question is why anybody is still taking him seriously.

Eric Eisenberg
Assistant Managing Editor

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.