Movie review: Bright

Hello!

A Netflix Christmas offering – Bright – has landed on the beloved streaming platform. Let’s see whether it will make Christmas better or worse.

IMDb summary: Set in a world where mystical creatures live side by side with humans. A human cop is forced to work with an Orc to find a weapon everyone is prepared to kill for.

Writing

Bright was written by Max Landis – a screenwriter who is known for being ‘promising’ rather than for actually delivering quality work. In fact, only his debut Chronicle was worthy of attention, while the follow-ups American Ultra and Viktor Frankenstein were lackluster. Sadly, Bright is joining that list of disappointments.

Bright’s script had a lot of interesting layers, however, not all of the layers meshed together. To begin with, I appreciated the fact that Landis attempted to marry fantasy and modernism – two concepts that rarely work together, at least in my opinion. He also did a good enough job of building the world of his story, though, at times, the movie’s mythology seemed to have been made up as the story went along. The magic wand idea was silly but worked as a plot device. The idea of a bright or basically, a wizard, was an example of an old concept given a new name. The orcs and elves were cool additions, though I wanted to find out more about them – also, I’d have loved if they differed from humans more than just in their appearance.

Speaking about orcs, elves, human, and faeries – these different species provided the movie with some commentary on race and/or caste. Separate human racial comments also seemed to have been present in the film (a few lines about Mexicans being blamed for something suggested to me that there are separations not only between species but within human race itself too). The fact that elves were the top and orcs – the bottom castes made Bright seem a bit like Lord of the Rings in the modern era. Since the antagonism between the species appeared to have been rooted in history, one could theorize that Lords of the Rings is an imaginary prequel to Bright.

At its basic, Bright was a crime thriller with two cops (a rookie and a seasoned one – a Training Day pair) at its center. The focus on police officers allowed the movie to explore real problems within the force – discrimination, corruption, and coverups – in a fictional story. However, the movie’s narrow focus on its two leads was also a hindrance as all of the other characters were painted as one-dimensional villains to the two ‘heroes’. Bright had a tone of supporting characters with their own agendas and their sidelines did not jell well in the film but just sort of converged accidentally and resulted in a messy narrative.

Directing

David Ayer directed the film and did an okay job. He used to be a highly acclaimed critical director (the aforementioned Training Day, End of Watch, and even Fury were all critical hits), however, his career started going downhill with Suicide Squad and is not gonna fair any better after Bright (it has been deemed rotten, plus, the fact that Netflix is distributing it automatically makes it a lesser film to a lot of traditional people in the business). It’s a shame that Ayer wasn’t able to make Bright work as well as he could have as this movie was his safe space – a crime thriller – a genre he has worked and succeeded in before.

I loved the beginning of the visual world building – the opening sequence with the graffiti. However, I wanted Bright to have more unique settings throughout the rest of the picture. The action was good too, though it was mostly just typical gunfights. The pacing of the film wasn’t bad – Bright didn’t drag much.

Acting

The two leads of the film were played by Will Smith (Collateral Beauty), who I have already seen in this role many times, and Joel Edgerton (Midnight Special, Loving), who was the standout despite all that heavy make-up and prosthetics. The multiple villainous characters were played by Noomi Rapace (What Happened To Monday), who barely had any lines and was just mostly fighting – wonder how much of that was done by her and how much by the stunt double; Édgar Ramírez (Point Break, The Girl on The Train), who looked great – a real dapper elf – but didn’t have much to do; Lucy Fry, who had a somewhat redeeming role; Ike Barinholtz (he co-wrote Central Intelligence), whose character was absolutely repugnant, and Alex Meraz, who played a interesting gang leader, who seemed like the most unique chracter in the film.

In short, Bright was an okay picture at best that set out to accomplish a lot of things but felt short with most of them.

Rate: 3/5

Trailer: Bright trailer