Bright (2017)

Los Angeles, in an Urban Fantasy world humanity shares with orc, elves and other typical fantasy creatures, and where some Dark Lord or other did Dark Lord-y things two thousand years ago, with only the orcs taking his side (a decision that has hounded their descendants ever since). Somehow, the place is still the same LA we know from a thousand movies and TV shows – with some very minor changes - but that’s Urban Fantasy, the least imaginative sub-genre concerned with the fantastic for you. Street cop Daryl Ward (Will Smith) is just returning from sick leave following getting shot, and he’s not a happy man. Being partnered up with the first orc managing to become a police officer, Nick Jakoby (the great Joel Edgerton) hadn’t been exactly to Ward’s taste already, but Nick’s inability to apprehend the orc who shot Ward really makes the always pretty grumpy human extra-grumpy.

To be fair to the man, Ward is probably the least orc-racist cop in town. Jakoby for his part doesn’t just have to cope with daily racism by humans but also with the fact that his nature as an “unblooded” orc (even filing down his excellent orc teeth “to fit in”) and a cop makes him anathema to orc society too. But, since this is a buddy cop movie, there will soon come quite a bit of outward pressure to turn the squabbling cops into a proper couple: they stumble onto the trail of a lost magic wand (in this world about as dangerous as an H-bomb), the elf who stole it (Lucy Fry), and the evil sorceress who actually owns it (Noomi Rapace, giving one of her by now patented fun villain performances), among other things. Lots of violence ensues, one-liners are uttered.

I’ve seen Bright described as one of the worst films of 2017 by more than one critic, which rather suggests these guys and gals haven’t seen all that many films during the year, or aren’t able to appreciate David Ayer’s Netflix big budget film for what it is: a pretty traditional buddy cop action movie (with a bit of comedy mixed in, of course) that just happens to include fantasy elements to mix things up a little. As such, it’s not terribly intelligent a movie, and its explorations of racism and police violence are paper thin, but that’s really not what this sort of film is about. Rather, it belongs to a genre all about men who can only express their tender feelings towards one another via squabbling, one-liners, and physical violence, and the quality of whose films is consequently measured by the fun-ness of the squabbling, the hilarity (intentional or un) of the one-liners, and the quality of the action sequences.

And I have to say, the squabbling is pretty fun – in part thanks to the delivery of old squabbling pro Will Smith and the always delightful Joel Edgerton –, the one-liners are cheesy, and the action set pieces are loud, varied, and sometimes downright exciting (turns out evil elves/elfs are pretty much supervillains while our poor heroes are only normally human/orcish, and not even the Batman kind of normal). That Ayer knows how to direct an action sequence was what made the last third of his generally misguided Suicide Squad watchable; here, the action is embedded in a script that may lack in depth but which certainly is much more focused than that of the DC movie (at least it knows what the film at hand is actually supposed to be about), providing Ayers with a much better environment to work to his strengths in this regard, something he does well and repeatedly.


There’s really not much more to Bright, but for my tastes, it ends up a thoroughly entertaining bit of popcorn cinema.