There's a Shrek joke delivered at just over the halfway mark in Bright that almost makes up for the movie being the cinematic embodiment of a busted, spewing sewage pipe.
Bright, streaming on Netflix now, is a fantastical retelling of social inequality in Los Angeles. The city is dominated by three races: the wealthy and elite elves, the middle-class and comfortable humans, and the detested orcs. After a war some 2,000 years ago leaves each race with an unhealthy disdain for the other races, an informal segregation has taken place. Things begin to change when Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), the first orc police officer inducted into the force through a diversity hire program, enters the scene.
When Jakoby is partnered with force veteran Daryl Ward (Will Smith), the two must overcome their prejudices to track down an evil, pureblood elf, Leila (Noomi Rapace), who wants to see the return of the Dark Lord and slaughter billions. With the help of a formerly evil elf, Tikka (Lucy Fry), Jakoby and Ward try to defeat the new threat facing their city, bridging together the divide between races in the process.
Director David Ayer and writer Max Landis’ Bright is bogged down by the shortcomings of their own ambitions. Landis’ attempt to weave a fantasy tale inspired by the real social injustices of society is impressive, but his efforts fail at every possible opportunity. The writer tries to massage warnings about racism, elitism, animal cruelty and other injustices into a movie that, ultimately, is nothing more than a couple of half-hearted actors running away from explosions.
Landis and Ayer try to turn Bright into a modern fantasy classic, using the differences that separate elf, human and orc as a way to mirror the injustices in our own world. There are scenes when it feels like Landis and Ayer may accomplish their goal, but then a throwaway joke is tossed into the mix and everything comes tumbling down, forcing the creative team to start rebuilding the shaky foundation of their metaphor.
Bright’s mishandling of sensitive topics that deserve to be handled with care is so mind boggling audacious that it quickly starts to feel like an insult to actual activism groups. There’s a scene at the beginning of Bright in which Smith’s all-American-bravado cop, Daryl Ward, is tasked with removing a pesky fairy hanging around his property. Fairies in the world of Bright are like mosquitos with personalities; hungry, menacing little creatures seen as a nuisance. Ward, broom in hand, prepares to kill the fairy, saying, “Fairy lives don’t matter today.”
It’s borderline insulting, but what makes watching Bright so painful is how obvious it is that Landis and Ayer are trying to do right by the wrongdoings they see. Bright tries to identify the biggest issues facing society today and start a dialogue, but in doing so creates more problematic conversations.
As The Daily Beast’s Ira Madison III said on Twitter, people “love making sci-fi movies with ‘allegories’ about race instead of making sci-fi movies about non-white people.”
Bright spends so much time on trying to be more clever than it actually is, that Ayer and Landis never take time to address the problems they set up. Problems faced by actual people of color in the movie, including Mexican-Americans who are still being treated poorly and black Angelenos who are forced live in dangerous pockets of inner-city LA, are ignored. Bright tries to use an allegorical approach to talk about race problems in America, but ignores actual issues faced by real humans in the movie. Even worse, it often feels like these groups are belittled or stereotyped in the process as a method of trying to make the ongoing war between orcs, elves and humans more prominent.
Landis and Ayer’s attempt to weave in actual socio-political statements about poverty and racism in America juxtaposed against the orcs and elves’ parable reads like ignorance over the treatment of actual people of color in favor of something less controversial. It’s not just disappointing and insulting, but it’s borderline dangerous. Bright’s mishandling of sensitive subjects seems to deliver a message: diversity hires are bad; police brutality is necessary; certain lives matter less than others.
Neither Landis or Ayer seem like they’re consciously trying to support that kind of ideology, but their reckless handling of important topics allows a sliver of space for people to read it this way. It’s disappointing that their goal of trying to make a movie condemning social injustice in general can be so easily misconstrued. Ironically, had Bright been successful in its ambitions, it could have been one of the most crucial films of 2017.
That’s why Bright is a difficult watch; its unfulfilled potential is painful to see play out. There are so many opportunities where it could have gone right, but it fails at almost every single turn.
The best thing Bright has going for it is Joel Edgerton’s performance as hardworking, bullied orc cop Jakoby. Edgerton manages to create an empathetic character with the little material he has to work with, and quickly becomes a beacon of hope for the movie. There’s genuine sadness for the prejudices he faces from his fellow officers and orcs, but he’s never given the proper chance to shine. His opportunity for greatness is squandered by an incessant need for Smith’s Ward to be the hero. Even in Edgerton’s best scene, it all comes undone because of a decision by other characters.
Bright could have been a great movie in the hands of people with expertise in allegorical storytelling and understanding of the subjects they wanted to tackle. Both Landis and Ayer bit off more than they could chew with Bright. Their attempt to create a movie of this perceived magnitude should be applauded, just like every creative willing to take a risk should — this just didn’t work out for them the way they’d hoped.
It’s a real shame, too. Bright could have been the optimistic first step we needed as we head into 2018, but instead it’s just a reminder of the world we’re a part of today.
I’m confident that I attended a critics’ screening of a movie called Bright, produced by Netflix and starring Will Smith. I definitely sat facing the front of the room, watching it project onto a big screen. My seat rattled a little during some of the gunfire and explosions. I took a bunch of notes.
But I’ll be damned if I have any idea what this movie is on about, or why. Halfway through, I broke one of my cardinal moviegoing rules — “never talk” — by leaning over to ask a colleague if the movie was supposed to be making sense by now. He winced. After the screening, I repeated the inquiry to a half-dozen fellow critics; everyone seemed a little stunned by the experience.
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Bright is a “gritty” cop film with orcs and elves thrown into the mix, though it might be a fantasy film onto which Training Day has somehow imposed itself. And while there’s nothing wrong with the idea of a genre mashup — Get Out is one, and so is Blade Runner — if you want to make a successful one, you do actually have to do something interesting with the two genres you’re combining, something that illuminates them both.
Given that both the police and fantasy realms offer rich opportunities to explore things like violence and racism and pluralism and courage, it’s frustrating to notice the seeds of an interesting movie everywhere in Bright. But it simply doesn’t stay focused on any one of them long enough for its potential to pay off, and it wears its social consciousness like decoration. Stuffing ripped-off mythical creatures into a formulaic police flick and casting Will Smith may get people to add the movie to their Netflix queue — the streaming service funded the movie and is distributing it, in a bid to prove that it can disrupt the big studios with a blockbuster that it releases directly into people’s living rooms. But that doesn’t make it any good.
In the world of Bright, orcs and elves coexist with humans
Bright in its simplest form is a buddy cop movie. It leans comic and dramatic by turns, but at its core it wants to be a comedy, centering on two LAPD officers who are stuck with one another: a human named Ward (Will Smith) and an orc named Jakoby (Joel Edgerton, utterly unrecognizable under very heavy prosthetics).
Yes, an orc. Bright exists in a universe very like ours, a place where racism and gun violence and police brutality all exist, but where there was some kind of vague battle a few thousand years ago between humans, orcs, and elves — and then when it ended, everyone somehow wound up living alongside one another. The elves are wealthy and magical, and seem to have all had copious plastic surgery; the humans are just humans; the orcs are generally hated, and relegated to the ghetto.
There is some kind of racial metaphor aching to get out here, but it’s either incredibly dumb or kind of evil — particularly because Jakoby is the first orc to be admitted to the LAPD (which nevertheless polices the whole city and all three species) and gives speeches about how orcs, who in days past chose the “wrong side,” need to make better choices now.
That Bright hurls out some kind of racial politics grenade and then runs away without tending to the explosion — in a movie about the LAPD, no less — should not be all that surprising; if you’ve watched the trailer, you know that “Fairy lives don’t matter today” is an actual line that Will Smith says, out loud. Still, the feint toward wokeness without any follow-up, or apparently any actual cognitive energy, feels both obscenely performative and too stupid to deal with.
The primary plot of the movie kicks off when Ward and Jakoby stumble into and especially tricky situation with an elf and an ancient wand that imparts great power to the bearer. The hitch, as far as I can tell, is that almost nobody can handle the wand. To do so, one has to be a “bright,” and very few humans are brights. But the wand is in high demand nonetheless, and Ward and Jakoby spend the night running around with it and an elf named Tikka (Lucy Fry), whose very powerful elf-sisters want her and the wand back, especially one named Leilah (Noomi Rapace).
Bright squanders every bit of its potential
Look, I know that all sounds pretty interesting. And it certainly could have been, because it’s a pretty terrific concept: Transplant the racial tensions that have always existed in movies about cops — and particularly about the LAPD — into a slightly unfamiliar world that helps emphasize the social commentary and make us think.
Visually, Bright is muddy and repetitive, but the fact that it’s directed by David Ayer — who despite having made Suicide Squad also wrote Training Day — might have been an aid to that endeavor.
Nope. Bright, with a screenplay by Victor Frankenstein and Chronicle scribe Max Landis, doesn’t even come close to saying anything meaningful. Its premise is great, but on the narrative and character level, everything falls to pieces. The most interesting mythologies (about the origins of the elves and the orcs and the whole system they’ve set up) are dashed off in quick montages, while the audience is forced to endure several ponderous, expositional stretches with the cops about how Humans and Elves Don’t Trust Each Other and Thus We’re Not Really Friends. In one scene, a bit of graffiti on the bathroom wall reads:
I love orcs — NOBODY
And that’s about as subtle as Bright can bring itself to be about its aims, while also somehow saying nothing at all. It’s the rare case of a movie that should have either been much more or much less ambitious than it is; at the very least, it definitely, definitely should have gone through a few more rounds of revisions.
In the end, Bright pulls off the uncommon (and not at all admirable) hat trick of being confusing, boring, and vaguely insulting about the matters it wants to appear smart on. The movie is a case of reading the room very wrongly, then slapping a lot of violence and muddled mythology on top as a means of distraction. It’s probably well suited for its straight-to-Netflix distribution, because watching it in the comfort of your own living room home affords you the option to check your phone or get up for another drink at your leisure. But it’s not a blockbuster in any significant sense of the word. It’s just a big waste of everyone’s time.
With that said, I should warn you: A sequel is already on the way.
Bright will open in limited theaters and release on Netflix on December 22.
Bright is a misnomer on two levels. First of all, the majority of Netflix’s new $90 million original movie takes place at night and in fairly dingy rooms, and that, in combination with how the whole production is lit, means that most of the action is obscured and visually unintelligible. Secondly, there’s nothing about this movie that’s an inherently good idea—or rather, very generously speaking, maybe the story could have made some valid points about the state of race relations in America with a little more thought. But as things stand, Bright plays like the kind of movie a kid might make up (“And then this happens! And then this happens!”) if they were given a very rough overview of American history and then told to write a script about it. It’s almost worse that that’s not the case—scratch that, it is worse—but we’ll get to that.
Directed by David Ayer (Suicide Squad) and written by Max Landis (Victor Frankenstein), Netflix’s new original movie is perpetually surprising in how off the rails it goes in terms of intent versus execution while also managing to be entirely predictable. Of course there’s a prophecy. Of course nobody’s actually going to die. Of course there’s a sequel set-up. On and on, there’s nothing particularly surprising about this movie, and the drab plot and visuals only make the storytelling missteps harder to ignore.
Set in present-day Los Angeles, Bright posits a world where orcs, elves, and humans (and centaurs, though I only saw one) have co-existed for thousands of years. Of course there are tensions between the races due to old conflicts that have never really been worked out. When LAPD officer Ward (Will Smith) is paired with the nation’s first orc officer, Jakoby (Joel Edgerton, unrecognizable under a mountain of prosthetics), tensions naturally ensue. So, orcs are perceived as thugs, elves are the one percent—there’s an entire “elven district”—and humans are, I guess, somewhere in between. It’s an idea that makes sense in, say, a freshman creative writing class, but not one that even remotely begins to work in this context.
The fact that orcs—a breed of monster that are generally known for brutishness and being both villains and cannon fodder in The Lord of the Rings—are essentially meant to take the place of African Americans in Bright’s attempt at unpacking race relations is a huge problem on its own, and begs even more questions in terms of what Landis was trying to do when actual race-relation problems still seem to exist in this fantasy-L.A.
In one scene, Will Smith snaps at his black neighbors, telling them to keep “doing all your gangster stuff,” suggesting that their presence is making it difficult to sell his house. Then there’s the Latinx gang, headed by Enrique Murciano sporting the nickname “Poison” and a face full of tattoos, who form the only other contingent of actual people of color in the entire movie. As a bunch of stereotypes thrown in with other stereotypes—given the way the orcs dress pretty much exactly the same as they do—where are they meant to fit in? It’s impossible that they’re nonexistent. At one point, a cop responds to an orc’s complaint about discrimination by telling him not to complain: “Mexicans still get shit for the Alamo.”
This is also a problem in that the other fantasy races are a non-presence. There’s no look into the lives of elves, or centaurs, or fairies (one of whom Ward kills in the movie’s bafflingly tone-deaf first scene as he declares, “Fairy lives don’t matter today”), to the point that I almost couldn’t help but wonder if working fantasy species into this story wasn’t just an excuse to not have to deal with any “real” politics and try to come off as progressive or edgy as a result, or a sort of cover-up to disguise the fact that this is a movie about racial discrimination and struggle written by a privileged white man (the son of John Landis) lacking any grasp of race relations.
Apart from Smith and Edgerton, each of the other characters have about five lines apiece, including big bad Leilah (Noomi Rapace, who has the mixed blessing of being the only “cool” character in a movie this dismal), MacGuffin Tikka (Lucy Fry), and Edgar Ramírez as an elf federal officer. Given the caliber of the dialogue they do get, maybe that’s for the best. All of the dialogue—and all of the music—seems to have been stolen from a second-rate video game. It’s enough to suck the life out of the usually-charming Smith; Edgerton is the only one in the cast who still seems to be really trying, which works in that you can’t help but feel sorry for him as he continues to leap through hoop after hoop, his earnestness so clearly placing him in an entirely different movie.
The jokes that pepper the script are dreadfully unfunny, then again this is a movie where Will Smith mows down a row of racist (fantasy-racist?) cops to the Bastille power ballad “World Gone Mad,” right as the lyrics “you don’t wanna fuck with us” are sung.
Despite all of this, Netflix has already greenlit a sequel. Hopefully, though, that announcement won’t act as your barometer. Bright is an unforgivable mess, and not in a way that’s fun to watch. If you’re home for the holidays and looking through Netflix for something bad-good to watch, do yourself a favor and pick something else. Maybe Pottersville. Life is too short to spend on a movie like this.
Will Smith Plays Cops-And-Monsters In Unremarkable 'Bright'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Matt Kennedy/Netflix Matt Kennedy/Netflix
Joel Edgerton's performance as Stanley Kowalski opposite Cate Blanchett's Blanche DuBois in the Sydney Theatre Company's 2009 A Streetcar Named Desire was one of the most unforgettable things I've ever witnessed on a stage. It would mark the pinnacle of a lesser artist's career, and an impressive career it would be. But for Edgerton, one of the many burly Aussies who has found steady employment playing American tough guys, mastery of Elia Kazan's vaunted Method was but preamble to strapping on a gun, pinning on a badge, and pulling on a lightly distressed Shrek mask in Bright — Netflix's feature-budgeted monster-cop thriller.
Monster Cop sounds like a well-established genre, doesn't it? Before Bright's hip-hop title sequence has even finished showing us, via graffiti, the social order of this movie-verse — elves are the slender and bejeweled one-percenters, orcs the rotund and systematically oppressed underclass, with humans in between — you'll likely feel you've tuned into the 11th episode of its second season instead of something ostensibly new.
That's because the buddy-cop template is so indelibly etched in adamantium that even putting the shaky rookie in monster makeup and making the MacGuffin a magic wand (that's really what Max Landis' script calls it) instead of a briefcase full of heroin of whatever barely affects the result. Critics have already lined up to pillory Bright as among the year's worst releases. Don't believe the clickbait. Lazy but not boring, this Net-flick is perfectly, stubbornly mediocre, and less a chore to sit through than either of 2017's Vin Diesel vehicles.
It's basically the gritty reboot of Alien Nation, a 1988 buddy-cop thing that paired grizzled LAPD veteran James Caan with a by-the-book cantaloupe-headed alien partner played by Mandy Patinkin. (There's a proud tradition of getting a well-regarded theatre actor to play the nonhuman cop, apparently.)
Anyway, I'm burying the lede here. A big chunk of this living room-sized dirty-cop thriller's $90 million budget must've gone to secure the services of Will Smith as the human — the part he was born to play, baby! (Suicide Squad, his prior collaboration with Bright director David Ayer, was a worldwide hit despite its abundant awfulness, so maybe he's still got some juice.) If nothing else, Bright reminds you how much fun Smith is to watch even when he's coasting: He's likeable and convincing as a rank-and-file uniformed flatfoot, drowning in debt and still five long years away from his pension. Smith can land a quip better than just about anyone in the game, but he dials down the cockiness of his heyday, mostly. "Fairy lives don't matter," he tells his day-drinking neighbors in an early scene, before swatting the fairy that's been eating out of his birdfeeder with a broom.
The joke is in such abysmally poor taste that it primes us to expect a more scabrous and lively sci-fi parable—something in the vein of the original RoboCop or They Live or District 9 — than the familiar survive-the-night scenario Landis, seemingly writing on a dare, coughs up.
Ayer purportedly reworked the screenplay to his liking, and certainly Bright feels like one of Ayer's downbeat law enforcement morality tales — he wrote Training Day and wrote and directed End of Watch and Sabotage. This time around, the chance to procure that magical wand —"like a nuclear weapon that grants wishes!" someone explains —is temptation enough turn many of Smith's brothers in blue (including, in the movie's most welcome casting coup, Margaret Cho as a pitiless sergeant) against him. They already hate him for refusing to help them railroad his orc partner anyway. The wand is the stolen property of Dragon Tattoo Girl-turned-Elf Queen Noomi Rapace, who wants to use it to bring about the return of the Dark Lord and the subjugation of all human and orc life, which is explicitly forbidden by the California Penal Code.
The term "Bright," by the way, refers to those uncommon specimens who were born with the je ne sans quoi it takes to wield a wand. Brights are rare among elves and all but unheard of among humans. The dirty job of explaining all this falls to the movie's other marquee player, Edgar Ramirez, who plays the nattily-dressed Special Agent in charge of the FBI's Magic Task Force, which is devoted to fighting cyber crime. I'm kidding. Whereas Rapace seems to be having a blast in her creature makeup and prosthetic fangs and contact lenses, Ramirez's embarrassment is palpable through his elfin makeover.
Maybe that's because he and his G-man partner, Mindhunter's Happy Anderson, are cursed to appear only in Bright's silliest scenes. The CGI armageddeon stuff is just as visually indistinct as it was in Justice League, but the scenes of Smith and Edgerton driving around on patrol, bickering like all the Murtaughs and Riggses and Crocketts and Tubbses and Cagneys and Laceys who've sat in cars together on stakeout since the First Age of Middle-Earth — lo, they cast a mighty spell of pure adequacy.
You are, in likelihood, too old for this s—t. But I, apparently, am not.
