Review of Bright (2017) by Matt D — 22 Dec 2017

I wanted to like this so much. I was into it for the first half or so, where they were setting up the world and stuff. Very cool ideas. But the rest of the movie was paced incredibly slow. The script could have just filled out a "Hero's Journey" template and it would have been a exciting & fun popcorn movie.

Bright's first act is actually... okay. The introduction to the world of Bright is really fun and for me it really got my imagination working. We are told indirectly about the social structure of this modern high fantasy world. There is a very cool shot of the LA skyline with a dragon in the sky. We meet Ward (Will Smith), an LAPD officer, and his Orcish partner, Nick. We are introduced to the conflict (grounded though it may be in a really stupid flashback) between Ward & Nick. We meet a sword-swinging crazy who tells Nick Ward is "chosen" for something. We learn there's some kind of conflict in the Elven community about bringing back "The Dark Lord", and the Ministry of Ma-- I mean, a federal agency called "Magic Task Force" (MTF) is involved in stopping this somehow. The MTF is also looking for an Elven traitor named Tikka.

We also learn there are magic wands, but these wands aren't the utilitarian spark sticks from Harry Potter. No, these are more like, in the words of Nick, "nuclear weapons that also grant wishes." Only "Brights", the in-world name for magic-users, can touch a wand without literally exploding. (Non-Brights can briefly hold a wand if they are wearing rubber gloves, though, as we learn late in Act I. Magic's impervious to rubber, I guess?) These magic wands are critical artifacts in the procedure for resurrecting "The Dark Lord.".

The movie starts falling apart in the second act, when Ward & Nick find a magic wand, and meet Tikka, the aforementioned Elven traitor. I won't bother writing about her; she's basically Leeloo from The Fifth Element with blonde hair. Like, exactly. Anyway, if we're following the "Hero's Journey" template for a movie, this is the part of the movie where Ward's magical guide, Tikka, tells him he has been chosen to prevent chaos from over-running the world. He reluctantly picks up the wand and learns he's a Bright. But before he can use it, Tikka, Ward and Nick have to escape from some bad guys. Everything seems bleak until Ward clumsily wields the wand to save himself and his friends from doom.

Unfortunately, none of this essential storytelling happens until literally the end of the film. Ward does not even take up the wand until one hour, forty-one minutes into the one hour, fifty-one minute movie. Far too much screen time is spent protecting the magic wand without ever seeing any magical anything. We don't even see the wand! It's stuffed in a black bag the director makes absolutely no effort to help us keep track of (hint: It's tucked into Tikka's overalls). Instead of doing anything fun or interesting, they:

- fight a human gang in the world's most boring running gun battle scene.

- meet an Orcish underworld boss (this would have been a really, really fun scene in a faster-paced movie, but here it just served to get in the way of the plot).

- tie up this utterly inconsequential plot point about an Internal Affairs investigation via the tropiest redemption trope they could've picked.

The writers, director and producers did not do this amazingly fun-sounding premise justice. I look forward to its inevitable remake that improves on this movie years from now.