Max Landis’ urban fantasy Bright is an appreciable, rough-around-the-edges popcorn flick. That it’s showing up on people’s Best Movies of 2017 lists reveals more about Hollywood’s–Bright was produced by Netflix–inability to tell an entertaining story than it says about the movie’s quality.
Before we get to my review, here are two pictures that readers of this blog will want to see juxtaposed:
Other than pointing out, once again, that The Last Jedi was a con game, there’s not much to say about those images. TLJ’s makers and media water-carriers are openly bragging about it being a piece of cultural Marxist propaganda. Most film critics already fall into the water-carrier category. Disney currently has the money and the muscle to whip the few dissenters into line.
The movie they’re fawning over was created as a triumphalist hate letter to its own core audience. The divergence in TLJ’s critic and fan scores is a mystery only to people who find either John Oliver or Ben Shapiro edgy.
Bright is being hailed in some quarters as a sort of anti-Last Jedi. Audiences liked it about as much as critics liked TLJ, but critics loathed Bright far more than fans disliked SJW Wars.
Why the disparity? 1) Netflix has neither the resources nor the inclination to buy/threaten critics like Disney does. 2) Landis had the gall to transgress the Hollywood pieties by writing a race allegory while white and male. No matter that he substituted fantasy creatures for real-life ethnic groups and took care to make the cast of human characters extra diverse. There’s no pleasing utopian cultists. It certainly can’t help that 3) the writer is about to get #MeToo-ed out of a career.
With the preliminaries out of the way, on to the review!
I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free.
Bright follows from the premise: “What if The Lord of the Rings actually happened?” It’s present-day in this alternate universe where orcs make up an oppressed underclass, the Eldar reap the fruits of elf privilege, and a small segment of the population can wield magic.
Will Smith plays a veteran LAPD officer who’s been partnered with the first-ever orc policeman. I can’t recall Smith’s character’s name, but I think the orc’s surname is Polish. Smith is opposed to this arrangement and faces pressure from co-workers and superiors alike to jettison orc-cop by fair means or foul. He’s working up to it when a random call thrusts an elf girl and a magic wand into Smith and his partner’s custody.
NB: In the world of Bright, being a magic user is akin to having a suitcase nuke. Wands are necessary to cast spells, and only the aforementioned fraction of the populace–called Brights–can touch wands without disintegrating.
Well-photographed and choreographed hi-jinks ensue.
What I liked about Bright:
- Looks slick. Minimal shaky cam. Workmanlike effects.
- Taking a page from Del Toro, faeries are rats with wings.
- Some genuinely funny character-based humor.
- The stakes are known, and high, reasonably early in the film.
- More creative than Hollywood movies are allowed to be these days.
What I disliked about Bright:
- Obligatory PC lecture from gratingly precocious, token post-racial child. Clearly included to spare Landis from the hatemob. Failed.
- The script needed another draft. Hobbled by plot holes you could fly a star destroyer through. Numerous Chekhov’s guns hung prominently on the mantel but never fired. The Internal Affairs subplot was unnecessary and had no effect on the rest of the movie.
- The magic system gets points for originality, but in this world magic is effectively omnipotent. To invoke Brandon Sanderson, what magic can do is always less interesting than what it can’t do.
- Choppy editing: Suffered from “and then” syndrome. Instead of always moving forward, the action doubled back and even went in circles on occasion. At least two scenes needed to be cut entirely.
Such an exceptional series with some of the most unique world building I have come across.
