Nearly 30 years later, along comes Bright – an LA-set thriller that’s essentially Alien Nation all over again, except with the sci-fi replaced with a smattering of Tolkien-esque fantasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with borrowing old ideas, necessarily: Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 had the premise of shunned aliens living in ghettos among humans, yet it brought a texture and style all its own. It all sounds good on paper. Will Smith stars as Daryl Ward, a surly cop who thoroughly resents being paired with Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton, under a mountain of blue makeup)- a new recruit who also happens to be the LAPD’s first orc with a badge. The backstory, largely told in an opening montage and accompanying jabs of dialogue, is that the fantastical wars told in the works of Tolkien weren’t the stuff of imagination, but part of our history. As a result, elves are now stand-ins for Earth’s richest one percent – they all wear fancy clothes, live in LA’s best districts, and some have fancy jobs in the FBI – while orcs form a hated underclass crammed into ghettos. Jakoby, then, is something of a trailblazer, and quietly absorbs the racial abuse and condescension of his human colleagues. Ward’s particularly frosty towards his orc partner, partly because he blames Jakoby for an incident involving a hoodlum with a shotgun, but largely because humans just hate orcs. One of Bright’s big, early problems is that it isn’t all that interested in the racial tension side of things – it’s far more keen to get into a story involving a magic wand, some corrupt cops and a dark elf named Leilah (Noomi Rapace), who wants the wand in order to revive some kind of ancient evil. Ward and Jakoby are caught in the crossfire, and along with a young elf named Tikka (Lucy Fry), struggle to keep the wand away from the brights – the film’s word for people powerful enough to harness the macguffin’s magic. Will Smith became a star through his smiling, easy-going charisma, so it’s quite something to encounter a cop as unpleasant as Daryl Ward. Put it this way: one of his earliest scenes sees him beat a tiny, humanoid ‘fairy’ to death with a broom, before yelling at his neighbours, “Fairy lives don’t matter today.” Cut to a close-up of the fairy’s broken body on the floor, oozing blood. Whether you think that sounds funny or faintly disturbing will probably define how you’ll get on with the film as a whole. Edgerton fares better, yet even he struggles to transmit much humanity through an overwrought facial appliance that looks somehow less convincing than the one Mandy Potenkin wore in Alien Nation. Indeed, for a film with such a handsome budget, Bright looks noticeably ramshackle in places – Netflix may want to beat Hollywood at its own game with this edgy and violent thriller, but its production values barely exceed a typical episode of, say, a Marvel TV show. Instead, Bright fixates on a dull cycle of bloody shoot-outs, chases and stand-offs – and after a while, even the locations become predictable if you’ve seen enough cop thrillers. The whole film takes place in various old warehouses, alleyways and strip joints, as Ward and Jakoby are pursued from place to place by Noomi Rapace’s monosyllabic elvish villain. At two hours, Bright feels inordinately long – and incredibly, there’s a jaw-dropping scene where the central characters spend several agonising minutes describing all the events we’ve just sat through. Netflix clearly has confidence in its latest creation – at the time of writing, a sequel’s just been announced – and, in theory, the elements are all there. But even with a proven writer-director pairing, not to mention some solid actors, nothing about Bright really works. The budget’s big, the concept’s high, but the magic is sorely missing. Bright is out on Netflix now.
title: “Bright Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-28” author: “Brian Hollars”
The basics of Bright are conventional enough. Will Smith is Ward, a veteran LAPD cop just a few years from retirement who’s been paired with a rookie partner, Nick Jacoby (Joel Edgerton). Nick is a “diversity hire” and faces considerable discrimination from other members of the force. During a particularly busy night out on patrol, the pair find themselves protecting a young girl (Lucy Fry), who has something that the bad guys (including Noomi Rapace) want. The difference? Nick is an Orc, the young girl is an Elf, and the thing the villains are hunting down is nothing less than an honest-to-goodness magic wand. While Will Smith isn’t exactly stretching out of his comfort zone with a movie like this, he’s a steadying, recognizable presence in a world that is only just a little bit sideways from our own. Considering that his co-star is completely unrecognizable under Orc makeup, it’s good to have a seasoned action star hitting some familiar beats. The movie gets most of the worldbuilding out of the way in the opening credits in clever fashion. As we get a brief tour around this alternate version of Los Angeles, the graffiti tells us much of the world’s backstory, and it’s a fine way to introduce an urban sprawl where the otherwise fantastic has become completely mundane. This sets the tone for the rest of the film, where fantasy races are utterly commonplace, and even magic, while a rarity, is something that has its own federal law enforcement branch (represented by a deadpan Edgar Ramirez looking sharp in Elf makeup). To its credit, Bright never for a moment loses sight of the importance of keeping its fantasy grounded. It benefits from some tight direction by David Ayer, who presents the film like an entirely straightforward cop movie, albeit one where the streets of LA are also crawling with gangs of Orcs. There are the expected echoes of Alien Nation, Lethal Weapon, and Training Day, and we get the requisite action sequence in a subsequently detonated gas station, as well as the old reliable “cops hunt a suspect in a nightclub full of loud music and spiky haired punks.” This street level Los Angeles feel and commitment to late ‘80s early ‘90s action movie conventions probably would have done his overblown and overcooked Suicide Squad a world of good. Still, it’s a pretty thin story, full of familiar action movie beats and a murky, fantasy movie prophecy, not helped by a forgettable (despite Noomi Rapace’s eerie presence) villain. The vast majority of the movie’s runtime takes place over one particularly bad night for its characters, which gives it an urgent, almost real-time feel, but also makes much of the rapid fire violence a little tiresome. It builds to a surprisingly claustrophobic climax (I mean that in the nicest possible way, as I could envision a world where we had a sky portal studio noted in), and a predictable one, at that. If this movie was trying to say anything deeper about race or class relations with its Orcs and Elves, that all remained, at best, underdeveloped, or perhaps best not thought about at all in this context. It seems like we’re short on this kind of non-franchise genre fare these days, let alone ones willing to take a chance with an R-rating. Bright never really lives up to the full potential of its high-concept, but it’s still a fun B-movie diversion that will play well enough during any Saturday afternoon Netflix session.
