Taking a Dim View of Bright

Title: Bright
Director: David Ayer
Screenplay: Max Landis

I was drawn to this for its Lord of the Rings meets modernity Shadowrun-esque mashup and mildly curious as to what yet another critic versus internet commenter controversy was all about. Perhaps the best way to put it is that the controversy is more interesting than the thing itself: it's Not That Bad, but then again it's Not Very Good.

The backdrop of modern LA with elves and orcs and magic is used as a heavy-handed allegory to modern American race relations, but frankly beyond the elves=white orcs=black setup, the movie has absolutely nothing to say about the subject, aside from one or two half-hearted 'can't we all get along' platitudes thrown in between explosions (No we fucking well can't, seems to be the message).

I've seen a number of people praising the world-building here, and those people must have damn good eyesight because I'm buggered if I can see what they're talking about. Dark Lord, magic scary, elves rich, orcs poor. That's it. It's not a well-realized world, it's a writing prompt, begging to be fleshed out in some detail, any detail. Instead, we get the world of 2017, only with orcs and elves and magic: literally nothing else about the setting is different.

Into this setting the plot throws Will Smith, here rather charmless and inconsistently characterized from scene to scene, and Joel Prosthetics, an orc cop whose personality is that he is an orc who is also a cop.

They find a McGuffin and other people also want the McGuffin, cue series of gunfights as the two stagger from scene to scene as though they were progressing through levels in a video game: there's a weird disconnect from any physical sense of space. Baddies appear at random. Scenes change as the two walk away briskly, oddly unpursued by anyone from their most recent bloodbath.

Oh, and there's tits too, because who is going to say no to tits.

It all culminates in an anticlimactic confrontation with evil elf ninjas that the plot says can murder an entire squad of swat police and a Chicano gang but will lose to a beat-up middle aged cop and his orc buddy. 

For all that though, it's not quite the festering pile of cinematic Hogwarts some critics have made it out to be. The dialogue between Will and Joel has its moments, mainly at the start before everything explodes, and Joel is sympathetic despite the layers of latex. Treating magic as something rare and special is a nice touch, even if it's only rather unimaginatively used to set fire to a couple of people throughout the movie.

Much of the critics' ire seems to be directed at the tone-deaf handling of race relations. As a white man living in an Asian country for the last 20 years, I must admit it didn't phase me that much, save as mentioned above, that it was completely extraneous to the story they were trying to tell.

More than that though, it seems to me that both critic and audience reviews are being driven to extremes, perhaps in order to be heard above the noise. If Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic have 50 reviews, you'll read maybe 3 or 4, and you'll likely pick those either at 5/5 or 1/5. Ditto for user reviews: I'll bet people skip by most reviews, reading a select few. In this environment then, I think both critic and audience scores are being pushed to the extremes, creating this kind of apparent divide.

In any event, it doesn't matter what we think. The sequel has already been greenlit, I hear. Here's hoping they spend a bit more time than 'bugger all' on the script next time.