Title: Bright (2017)

Director: David Ayer (Suicide Squad)

Cast: Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, Lucy Fry, Noomi Rapace, Edgar Ramirez

Plot: In a world where magical creatures live alongside humans, Los Angeles police officer Daryl Ward (Smith) and his Orc partner Nick Jakoby (Edgerton) find themselves in a dangerous battle to stop powerful magic from wrecking havoc on the city.

“This is like a nuclear weapon that grants wishes”

Review by Eddie on 16/01/2018

Netflix’s biggest and most ambitious feature film yet, unlikely to be surpassed until Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is released in the near future, Bright is a high profile affair that has received its fair share of critical drubbings since its release in late December and while some of the harsh and unforgiving criticisms of the film are a little over the top, David Ayer’s big budget follow-up to the increasingly lambasted Suicide Squad is very far from the film it could’ve been.

Set in an alternate reality where the world in which we live is shared with Orcs, Elves and various other mythical creatures, that years ago were defeated by humans and now live in peace with us, Bright has a loaded backstory and foundation that is instead largely ignored by Ayer so that he can instead focus on what he knows best; the gritty and grimy cop thriller that he honed as a screenwriter with Training Day and director of films like Street Kings and his best film, End of Watch.

You get a sense that screenwriter Max Landis’s original vision for Bright was focused much more on the magical and mythical side of the story, that likely would’ve included more insight into this odd new world but while it’s great Ayer is looking to overcome the disappointment of Suicide Squad with something once more suited to his particular brand of film-making, it makes Bright feel like a small portion of a much bigger pie we never get to see, let alone taste.

Instead of offering us a look at the world of Bright, we get quickly placed alongside Will Smith’s street cop Daryl Ward and his partner in the form of Joel Edgerton’s orc police officer Nick Jakoby as the mismatched duo find themselves protecting Lucy Fry’s magical orientated Tikka who has found herself in a spot of bother with Noomi Rapace’s big bad Leilah, who wants her wand back and to do the “Dark Lord’s” bidding (yep they couldn’t think of a better name than The Dark Lord).

Smith and Edgerton share an easy to enjoy on screen chemistry, even if neither role stretches the capable actors, bar Edgerton’s seemingly cumbersome makeup and prosthetic’s but with our focus on these two determined cops you cant help but escape the feeling that the film of Bright is only sharing with us a few brief snippets of what we could’ve been getting and while Ayer can do action, as Bright’s story sinks further and further into generic action thriller tropes, the magic that we’ve been promised disappears into a dull and tiresome plot that feels more like a stepping stone into something more; something more we may get with the recently announced sequel.

Final Say –

Bright starts off in an intriguing enough fashion, giving us a glimpse of a unique world unlike any we’ve seen before but as Ayer’s film sinks further and further into a seen a thousand times before cop thriller, Bright ends up showing only brief glimmers of the film it could’ve been had it focused on the strength’s that make it stand out from the crowd.

2 Foosball tables out of 5