In a bold attempt to mash the Shadowrun franchise with buddy cop films such as Lethal Weapon and Theodore Rex, director David Ayer has created a film that follows in the style of his Oscar-winning movie Suicide Squad. With unlikable characters, painful and cliche dialog, hamfisted social commentary, and a bland soundtrack, Bright is sure to make you wish you’d spent two hours of your life doing anything else.
Bright is about two cops of the LAPD, Lt. Ward (Will Smith) and Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), who happens to be the first orc cop. Because social commentary, everybody is an absolute racist dick to Jakoby, even his partner. Honestly, I’ve never seen Will Smith so unlikable in a movie. He transcends being an anti-hero and is an absolute asshole, especially in the first third of the movie. They try and build the relationship between Ward and Jakoby, but it never feels earned. It doesn’t help that Jakoby isn’t particularly interesting either. You know you’re in trouble when the two leads in your buddy cop movie aren’t likable or interesting.
The two end up having to protect an elven girl, Tikka (Lucy Fry), who is a Bright, someone who can use magic wands. This puts them on the run from the cops, gangsters, and the evil elf who’s played by Noomi Rapace. The main villain’s motivations are boring ‘take over the world’ type nonsense that has been done one-thousand times before. I also found the story fairly predictable at times and overall I struggled to engage with the narrative.
The dialog in this movie is truly painful. If you took a shot for every pop culture reference, you’d die of alcohol poisoning. The same goes for poor attempts of humor. Buddy cop movies like Lethal Weapon, The Nice Guys or even David Ayer’s End of Watch are known for snappy, witty dialog that engages the viewer. As you can tell, I found Bright to have the opposite effect.
On top of this, there’s a huge theme of racism that is shoved down your throat right from the opening montage and throughout most of the movie. I respect racism is an important social issue but beating us over the head with ‘racism bad’ just feels insulting.
The soundtrack isn’t all that great either. Music is either hip-hop, heavy metal/punk or generic movie orchestral score that tries to elevate the importance of what’s going on. It could have been a lot worse, but it certainly didn’t add to the movie.
Some of the action was decent. I somewhat enjoyed the car chase that happens halfway through. There was also a lot of creative use of improvised weapons which I also liked. That said the action isn’t amazing, nor is it enough to save Bright from being painful to watch.
This is easily a contender for worst movie of the year for me. Just about everything failed to be interesting or even decent. I’d say David Ayer is a competent (although not brilliant) filmmaker but he needs to step away from these fantasy/comic book style movies and get back to the gritty crime-dramas people like him for (so long they’re not as bad as Sabotage).
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