'Lord of the Rings meets Lethal Weapon' reads as a film pitch cooked up in a basement by a 14-year old, doped up on hours of Diet Coke and Call of Duty - a 'high concept' only in the most literal sense of the world. Still, it's unexpected, goofy, and replete with playful potential that it just may have been crazy enough to work. The key to it working, naturally, being acknowledgement of how crazy it is. Unfortunately, that memo was one messenger eagle that director David Ayer and writer Max Landis didn't quite receive in time. And lo: the prophecy of the mischievous, tongue-in-cheek genre revisionism that might have been became consumed by a shroud of darkness - in ever sense of the word. And from that darkness - asininely self-important, drearily predictable, and executed with the lumbering, pitiful tactlessness of a hobbit let loose in a brewery - nothing could emerge. Least of all, anything Bright.
If a director's paramount priority is confidence in their project, Ayer certainly earned his paycheque, as it's impossible to imagine a more daftly earnest take on his given material, even from the director of the painfully idiotic Suicide Squad. Tackling his film's dissonant fantasy and gritty, urban crime tropes with a ludicrously self-important swagger, Ayer's film is so deliriously serious that, paradoxically, it's impossible to take even remotely seriously. For all the expansive potential of its conceit, Bright is a dour, plodding, paint-by-numbers cop thriller, replete with more MacGuffins, conveniences, cloying foreshadowing, and exposition than you can shake a glock at, all enacted with joyless stupefaction... and fairies.
Ah - but didn't you know? The fantasy creatures are A-LLE-GOR-I-CAL, a word Landis has clearly searched on Urban Dictionary while flossing with the pages of his Superman back issues. Behold: in the midst of the genre crossover nobody was craving comes a hackneyed commentary on contemporary racial tensions nobody was waiting for, as Landis wears his film's racial subtexts on his sleeve with customary insufferable smugness, and all the insight of a sixth grade civil rights essay. Characters don't speak dialogue so much as burp racial slurs at each other, in a staggeringly misguided thematic dead horse beaten long before the cameras rolled, from the offensively thuggish orcs to a stroll through the walking Gucci commercial of 'Elf Town' that can't help but amusingly recall Who Framed Roger Rabbit's 'Toon Town.' But hey - Landis is a man who got paid millions of dollars for penning the line "fairy lives don't matter," so this is the world we live in, apparently.
Amazingly, the clash of stale cop clichés and stale fantasy clichés only serves to amplify rather than negate one another, with the only mirth coming from Ayer's relentless street posturing lending the film airs of surreally heightened nonsense. If you thought watching actors spitting out the words "magic wand" with grim scowls on their faces wasn't silly enough, try watching Will Smith murder(?!) the rest of his police squad(!!) over a dispute for the so-called "magical WMD..." then falls prey to the outlandishly lazy "oops, I dropped the wand - y'know that thing that the entire conflict hinges on" conceit not once, but TWICE! All of a sudden, the "Starlight" Elf/Dwarf romantic triangle from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit isn't looking so stupid by comparison, is it?*
For a film called Bright (paradoxes are more plentiful than dialogue here), Ayer vomits up a murky soup of grisly hues ranging from 'cement' to 'muddy, bloody cement," while lurching from back alleys to cult Elven safe houses to strip clubs. Even the uninspired grey orc prosthetics blend into the visual muck, while the film's sub-par visual effects and perfunctory, sleepy shootouts and fight scenes do little to pep up the drab proceedings. The occasional flickers of visual inventiveness (in one shot, a distant dragon flaps by, framed by a cityscape sunset) are mere flirtations of the world and movie we'd love to burst out and explore if we could shake off the infuriatingly daft, small-minded story blinders we're shackled to.
(Side note: spending an entire movie announcing the triumphant return of 'The Dark Lord,' only to leave genre diehards suffering through this mess with fantasy blueballs, is particularly unconscionable salt rubbed into a wound of disappointment)
Even Will Smith's inherent charm is quashed under a veneer of sour, unrelenting unpleasantness, while the prosthetics-laden Joel Edgerton, bizarrely elects to play his put-upon orc officer as a dopey, sweet simpleton, making him arguably even more dislikable. The two hit upon embers of chemistry, and it's easy to imagine enjoying their banter under different circumstances, but their flamboyantly dissonant, but equally sloppy, performances range from drab to obnoxious here instead. Supporting them, Lucy Fry contributes nothing more than frustrating noise as an irritating riff on Milla Jovovich from The Fifth Element, while Noomi Rapace, though promisingly conjuring kernels of sleek menace, is far too under-utilized a foe to generate much scenery-chewing threat. Still, muzzling the excellent Margaret Cho with a wholly unironic performance as a grim, kinda racist police chief, is perhaps the film's missed opportunity for fun. When even the career comedians don't get to provide comedic relief, you know something is rotten in the state of potential.
That rare bastardization of pop culture that would see both Tolkien and Shane Black fans cueing up to tape David Ayer to a chair, and force him to watch endless replays of Jared Leto's Joker, Clockwork Orange style, as penance, Netflix's $90 gambit may not have been as costly a bellyflop as it would've been as a cinematic release. But a proposed SEQUEL, with Ayer still attached?! The future is (you asked for it) not so Bright. In the words of its cavalierly disgraced lore: Bright shall... not... pass!
-4/10
*Just kidding. It's still so stupid I probably sacrificed at least 15 brain cells just remembering it.
If a director's paramount priority is confidence in their project, Ayer certainly earned his paycheque, as it's impossible to imagine a more daftly earnest take on his given material, even from the director of the painfully idiotic Suicide Squad. Tackling his film's dissonant fantasy and gritty, urban crime tropes with a ludicrously self-important swagger, Ayer's film is so deliriously serious that, paradoxically, it's impossible to take even remotely seriously. For all the expansive potential of its conceit, Bright is a dour, plodding, paint-by-numbers cop thriller, replete with more MacGuffins, conveniences, cloying foreshadowing, and exposition than you can shake a glock at, all enacted with joyless stupefaction... and fairies.
Ah - but didn't you know? The fantasy creatures are A-LLE-GOR-I-CAL, a word Landis has clearly searched on Urban Dictionary while flossing with the pages of his Superman back issues. Behold: in the midst of the genre crossover nobody was craving comes a hackneyed commentary on contemporary racial tensions nobody was waiting for, as Landis wears his film's racial subtexts on his sleeve with customary insufferable smugness, and all the insight of a sixth grade civil rights essay. Characters don't speak dialogue so much as burp racial slurs at each other, in a staggeringly misguided thematic dead horse beaten long before the cameras rolled, from the offensively thuggish orcs to a stroll through the walking Gucci commercial of 'Elf Town' that can't help but amusingly recall Who Framed Roger Rabbit's 'Toon Town.' But hey - Landis is a man who got paid millions of dollars for penning the line "fairy lives don't matter," so this is the world we live in, apparently.
Amazingly, the clash of stale cop clichés and stale fantasy clichés only serves to amplify rather than negate one another, with the only mirth coming from Ayer's relentless street posturing lending the film airs of surreally heightened nonsense. If you thought watching actors spitting out the words "magic wand" with grim scowls on their faces wasn't silly enough, try watching Will Smith murder(?!) the rest of his police squad(!!) over a dispute for the so-called "magical WMD..." then falls prey to the outlandishly lazy "oops, I dropped the wand - y'know that thing that the entire conflict hinges on" conceit not once, but TWICE! All of a sudden, the "Starlight" Elf/Dwarf romantic triangle from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit isn't looking so stupid by comparison, is it?*
For a film called Bright (paradoxes are more plentiful than dialogue here), Ayer vomits up a murky soup of grisly hues ranging from 'cement' to 'muddy, bloody cement," while lurching from back alleys to cult Elven safe houses to strip clubs. Even the uninspired grey orc prosthetics blend into the visual muck, while the film's sub-par visual effects and perfunctory, sleepy shootouts and fight scenes do little to pep up the drab proceedings. The occasional flickers of visual inventiveness (in one shot, a distant dragon flaps by, framed by a cityscape sunset) are mere flirtations of the world and movie we'd love to burst out and explore if we could shake off the infuriatingly daft, small-minded story blinders we're shackled to.
(Side note: spending an entire movie announcing the triumphant return of 'The Dark Lord,' only to leave genre diehards suffering through this mess with fantasy blueballs, is particularly unconscionable salt rubbed into a wound of disappointment)
Even Will Smith's inherent charm is quashed under a veneer of sour, unrelenting unpleasantness, while the prosthetics-laden Joel Edgerton, bizarrely elects to play his put-upon orc officer as a dopey, sweet simpleton, making him arguably even more dislikable. The two hit upon embers of chemistry, and it's easy to imagine enjoying their banter under different circumstances, but their flamboyantly dissonant, but equally sloppy, performances range from drab to obnoxious here instead. Supporting them, Lucy Fry contributes nothing more than frustrating noise as an irritating riff on Milla Jovovich from The Fifth Element, while Noomi Rapace, though promisingly conjuring kernels of sleek menace, is far too under-utilized a foe to generate much scenery-chewing threat. Still, muzzling the excellent Margaret Cho with a wholly unironic performance as a grim, kinda racist police chief, is perhaps the film's missed opportunity for fun. When even the career comedians don't get to provide comedic relief, you know something is rotten in the state of potential.
That rare bastardization of pop culture that would see both Tolkien and Shane Black fans cueing up to tape David Ayer to a chair, and force him to watch endless replays of Jared Leto's Joker, Clockwork Orange style, as penance, Netflix's $90 gambit may not have been as costly a bellyflop as it would've been as a cinematic release. But a proposed SEQUEL, with Ayer still attached?! The future is (you asked for it) not so Bright. In the words of its cavalierly disgraced lore: Bright shall... not... pass!
-4/10
*Just kidding. It's still so stupid I probably sacrificed at least 15 brain cells just remembering it.