'Bright'

Bright was...pretty dim.

So recently, my wife and I sat down and watched the Netflix original movie released in 2017 Bright, starring Will Smith as a human cop Daryl Ward and Joel Edgerton as orcish cop Nick Jakoby.

Read what I am about to tell you very carefully because this is vital to understanding the plot of the movie:

Thousands of years prior to the events of the film orcs sided with the Dark Lord in his attempt to conquer the world and they were defeated by the combined might of humans, elves, and some un-blooded orcs who had not sided with the evil warlord. There are now prophecies, which may or may not be intertwined, stating that by combining the might of three magic wands, which are insanely powerful magical items, the evil and clandestine group called “The Inferni” can resurrect the Dark Lord and that a human will do something important to stop that, and an un-blooded orc will get resurrected.

Un-blooded means that the orc is without a clan and thus must file down his tusks in order to signify their shame.

Orcs are considered the lowest class citizens in this world and only recently has there been an orc allowed on the LAPD, Nick Jakoby, who is partnered with veteran police officer Daryl Ward.

Got all that? Like I said, that information is essential to understanding anything that is going on in this movie. None of that world-building background comes to play until the bottom of the second act, so you spend over half the movie running around on patrol with two characters that don’t really like each other and you basically feel uncomfortable around them the entire time. Like hanging out with a couple where one always complains and the other always apologizes. You just want to leave.

Six minutes of narration with some pretty spiffy visuals were used in 'Lord of the Rings' to set up their world. A text crawl set up 'Star Wars' before you even got started on your popcorn. But oh no, David Ayer cannot do this for you.

The twist here is, Will Smith is the unlikable one. He spends the movie constantly complaining, being confrontational with people who he has stated, literally a few scenes before, he needs to ass-kiss to keep his pension. Jakoby, who feels guilty for having failed his partner prior to the events of the film feels a hideous amount of guilt and is constantly trying to make things right between them and you actually feel for his plight. I mean, you don’t feel for him because he’s in a genuinely unfair position in life, with constant racism breathing down his neck (that’s handled pretty badly), but rather because he’s the most likable character in the whole friggin movie.

And saying that Edgerton’s Jakoby is the most likable character doesn’t mean I want two hours of him in a stand-alone film. No, just that he’s just more likable than an aging douche and his consecutively worse and worse co-workers. Literally four of them plan to murder our main characters and the set up was done so poorly that you genuinely do not care.

One of this movie’s greatest flaws is that David Ayer, the director, doesn’t know how to flow character development. We know nothing about our antagonists, from the four dirty cops to the big bad villain to the mid-range opponents in between, so when they come out and do an exposition dump about their character’s motivations, it feels like someone took a dump of dialog in the middle of an action sequence. He’s had this very same problem before in Suicide Squad where he expects you to identify and sympathize with unlikable characters simply because the camera is following them for the majority of the film.

Speaking of action sequences, these go on WAY too long. That’s really all I can say about that, is that the action sequences are dragged out to an obscene degree with no feeling of tension or suspense. The movie’s plot and beats are so paint-by-numbers that you are not surprised by anything that splashes across the screen. This, combined with just a terribly messy origin story that is hacked up and told out of order through various characters across the ENTIRE RUNTIME of the film, make this movie kind of a chore to sit through.

Then you have your “Wait, what?” moments in the film. Case in point; the LAPD Internal Affairs division suspects that Jakoby lied about an incident that happened prior to the film and have actual forensic evidence to back them up. So they decided to strong-arm Ward into trying to get Jakoby to admit to wrongdoing rather than confront him with their actual evidence. Wait, what? Any case leveled by LAPD against one of their own officers would be 100 percent more effective with evidence rather than hoping for the off chance that Ward who doesn't like talking to Jakoby anyway, could talk a confession out of him.

Another example is shortly after everything hits the fan at the end of act one, and the fact that apparently LAPD only has six officers on duty. Ward and Jakoby respond to a call a little more than halfway through their shift to a residential location and immediately take fire. Sometime after this, there is a shootout between the four dirty cops and Ward and Jakoby calls it in over the radio and then they just completely disappear of LAPD’s radar. So the LAPD has confirmed four officers down, three dead, one wounded, and the guys who called it in are just gone, and decided not to scour the city looking for them. Wait, what? Every modern law enforcement vehicle has a tracking device in the mobile digital terminal, the computer in the car. Dispatch uses this to track locations of vehicles because they need to know which one is closest to the next call and because sometimes they get stolen. Dead cops are a very big deal to law enforcement agencies. Very, very big deal and if you have three or four of them (it ends up being four) then you have everyone and everything looking for anyone involved in it. The first thing they would have done is try and track the vehicle assigned to the guys who were there for the shoot out, short handed or not.

These are just some narrative inconsistencies from a film that tried to pride itself on being a hyper-realistic cop drama with fantasy elements.

Then there is Will Smith. Oh Will Smith. He Will-Smithed all over this one. He plays a cop with five years until retirement, who’s getting too old for this stuff. He’s playing Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. He dug the foundation for his career by playing off this character and I guess has come full circle. We are dealing with old Will Smith, but he’s still Will Smith, so he has to have the badass moments, despite the fact that his orc partner should have the most badass moments because he’s a friggin orc. He still has the witty one-liners, even though Jakoby was written as funnier and more likable. I’m not saying the roles should have been reversed, or that he should have been recast, Smith and Edgerton have some really good on screen chemistry toward the end of the film. It’s a good performance, just, he’s playing Will Smith. If you were getting used to seeing Smith actually getting lost into his higher-browed pictures, you won’t get that here. You will get Will Smith. Old and grumpy, but Will Smith.

At the end of the day, this movie is exactly what it seems to be, a gritty cop drama with fantasy elements thrown in to shake things up. Unfortunately, it has some of the flaws usually associated with a David Ayer movie, using clichés and an inconsistent narrative.

So, would I recommend the movie? Either you liked Suicide Squad and Training Day or you didn’t. If you did, go ahead and give this one a go. If you didn’t, don’t sweat it. I know I gave this movie a rough review, but honestly, it's one of those that I can turn on in the background and do other things while half paying attention and not miss anything but still feel relatively entertained. Was it entertaining? Sure. Was it thought provoking? No. The ham-fisted narrative made the action sequences weird and incomprehensible against the whole of the story. It was alright, not great, not good