Review of Bright (2017) by Late R — 11 Nov 2018

I love the premise - the idea of mixing a modern-day world with fantasy elements is always appealing - and the way it's executed here is interesting and unique. They didn't go too over-the-top with the fantasy stuff and it felt well-integrated into a grimy looking, modern-day LA. It's nicely designed, too, with particularly impressive Orcs whose character design is fantastic and was brilliantly realised with physical makeup and prosthetics. As for the actors, it's Joel Edgerton's show all the way. Will Smith, well, he's Will Smith playing Will Smith, basically, and Noomi Rapace doesn't really get enough screen-time to show what she's capable of.

Now, there are two things that stop this from being as good as it could have been: a) the story where the interesting parts are outweighed by the generic, predictable, and quite poorly written/messy parts; and b) the dialogue, which is just terrible. That's particularly unfortunate when you have to listen to words coming out of people's mouths for almost 2 hours. Still, the idea is fantastic and it's nice to look at making it absolutely watchable, but there's room for improvement. With better writing, the whole thing has great potential.