Review of Bright (2017) by Shayan S — 05 Jan 2018

Quick Review: Director David Ayer and screenwriter Max Landis share one common thing in their careers for me personally that made me going into this not wanting to hate it right off the bat: They made one thing I at least could get behind. I understand how very generic and kind of obvious that statement is (considering this can be applied to like almost any well successful filmmaker or screenwriter) but I preference this because these guys are people I used to get behind; David Ayer's Fury is still a solid film of his I give him the best of credit for and Max Landis script for Chronicle was so incredibly well executed with the help of Josh Trank's directing and even had a great Superman comic series. So meaning these two have done work in the past I've liked a lot and hoped some good potential could come out of it. But unfortunately, Ayer has been suffering studio meddling and bland directing and meanwhile Max Landis (just in my humble opinion) has been becoming incredibly obnoxious from his very self-entitled presence online, to the dumb 'Mary Sue' comment on Force Awakens that I just personally have too much bias against, being a hypocrite for saying his problems with certain films he says he doesn't want to act like he can do better but will go out of his way anyway on Twitter to making a re-edit of that existing film in a new script, and other issues for the sake of getting back on topic I'll leave at that. So when I heard Bright was being made I was, well more than skeptical; despite the pretty decent concept and Netflix (who finance pretty decent original shows) funding it. And I can safely say that after seeing it, I was unpleasantly disappointed by how bad the film turned out, and how much of a misfire this was for both Ayer and Landis.

While the only nice things I can say about the film are that on a technical level it's decent and does it's job (shots are decently framed, sets are nothing special but serve the film, costumes are fine, cinematography is mediocre but again serves its purpose, and etc), the acting with Will Smith and Joel Edgerton play off each other is handled alright, and it has maybe some jokes that work and it's concept is still a interesting way to frame it, that's pretty much where I stop; because the rest of the film is just really bad. The film suffers from a plethora of issues like a very uneven and messy pace, clunky and almost awful direction from Ayer; especially on action sequences, the acting from everyone else either being bland or insanely over the top, the overuse and annoyance of profanity (which I cannot believe im using this as a negative but it's so overused to where it's not used for dialogue but just to show how 'edgy' the film is), off place humour, disappointingly poor set up of world building, very unimaginative main characters that have nothing set up in their arcs for the main story to play off of, way too many plot issues and just out of nowhere conflict, and just lacks of any moral or theme or intrigue to get you to care about what's going on. Overall Bright was just a mess for me, not enough for it be angrily awful like other films i've seen but a mess regardless; from the clearly lack of any character driven narrative from Landis to the very clunky and unintriguing visual direction from Ayer. Now look, I encourage ideas like what Landis thought of to be explored, I really do. But they don't mean anything unless they have the right execution, and Bright just doesn't do it. Which is a shame because I like Ayer and I want him to try and get some good work, meanwhile Landis im really indifferent on but I hope can impress me at some point. Here's hoping in the sequel, which they did announce, or franchise im sure Netflix is planning they can really flesh out this world and make it interesting enough to care about.