The reviews for Netflix's 'Bright' are in — and critics say the Will Smith movie is 'astoundingly bad in virtually every way'
Netflix
- Reviews for "Bright," a big-budget Netflix fantasy movie starring Will Smith, are out.
- It's a buddy-cop movie with orcs and fairies.
- Critics say the movie, directed by David Ayer of "Suicide Squad," is eye-roll-worthy
If Netflix has its way, "Bright" will be the start of a new major franchise that will rock Hollywood. It's the first major fantasy action movie from the franchise, with a reported $90 million budget and starring one of the biggest names in the world: Will Smith. The movie doesn't come out on the streaming service until Friday, and Netflix is already planning a sequel.
"Bright" takes place in a world where humans, elves, orcs, and other magical creatures all coexist. Smith plays an LAPD officer who teams up with an Orc (played by Joel Edgerton) and finds a magical artifact that threatens the world as they know it.
Critics hate it. Here's what they're saying.
The story is unbelievably stupid.
"You’d struggle to find something in 'Bright' — there’s like, maybe, one sequence of banter between Smith’s Ward and Edgerton’s Nick that didn’t make you want to scoff. But it’s right at the end and you’d have to make it through 110 minutes of epic eye-rolls to get there, and the thing with streaming is there is no obligation to sit through it all — it’s not like you paid $22 to walk through the cinema door."
The movie develops potentially interesting racial metaphors.
"Hulking orcs are discriminated against (though they still play in the N.F.L.), while sleek elves live in luxury and 'run everything.' There are also bird-size fairies that sometimes fly around; perhaps they are sentient as well. But when our hero, L.A. cop Daryl Ward (Smith) swats and kills one, he announces, 'Fairy lives don’t matter today' —a typical example of the film’s attempts at humor."
— Vanity Fair's Jordan Hoffman
...but then turns them into sour jokes.
"It’s rare to see a movie so toxic that it manages to raise multiple red flags before the very first shot, but 'Bright' is a special piece of work. As if the goofy crackle of blue magic that runs through the Netflix logo isn’t enough of a warning sign, that gag is followed by a card for a production company called 'Trigger Warning Entertainment.' Just gonna go out on a limb and suggest that these might not be the best people to make a thinly veiled metaphor for America’s racial violence that starts with Will Smith swatting a rodent-like garden sprite and declaring that 'Fairy lives don’t matter!' Lock and load, snowflakes!"
The mythology is underbaked.
"The elevator pitch is easy enough to understand, even if it requires some further explanation: 'Bright' is essentially “Training Day” meets “The Lord of the Rings,” but much dumber than that sounds. Imagine, if you will, that the war for Middle Earth was a seismic event on our timeline, and that all of the various fantasy creatures who participated in the fight simply went their separate ways once it was over."
"Suicide Squad" director David Ayer made another flop.
"As for Ayer’s direction, 'Bright' has a lot more in common with his thudding, at-times-incomprehensible 'Suicide Squad' than his respectably lean tough-guy movies 'Fury' and 'End of Watch.' The film’s look and tone is so aggressively grim that the title almost seems like a joke."
— The Los Angeles Times's Noel Murray
Netflix should rein him in.
"'Bright' feels like a testament to the Hollywood development process. Fair or not, the kinks that undo Bright feel like the kind of issues that would have been ironed out along the way in a conventional movie studio scenario, with script polishing and script doctoring potentially making for a better movie from the same promising core concept."
The script, by "Victor Frankenstein's" Max Landis, clumsily makes a mess of racial issues.
"Astoundingly bad in virtually every way ... Max Landis’ script — supposedly rewritten heavily by Ayer — turns the whole mess into a parable of discrimination, clumsily evoking troubling moments in race relations both new ('Faerie lives don’t matter today') and old (the Rodney King beating) to preach tolerance while somehow doubling down on stereotypes of Latinos and other people of color."
At least they put some thought into the movie's design.
"There are some legitimately fun touches in all of this. I appreciate that most of the elves look like they’ve had work done, a kind of IRL Facetune glow. The Illuminati hideout is inside a believably drab L.A. apartment complex, because of course that is where you would hide an altar to the Dark Lord."
Will Smith made a huge mistake.
"Things go seriously off the rails as the film lurches to its conclusion. Smith seems to know how bad the film is so he agrees to have his face hit repeatedly, leaving it puffy and bloody. Perhaps he hopes no one can recognize him anymore. But there's no escaping the truth. This film makes his misfire 'Wild Wild West' looks like 'The Godfather.' Plus, he knows he just buried the buddy cop film genre. You'll never see two cops swapping snide comments in the front seat of a cruiser again — and not laugh."
— The Associated Press's Mark Kennedy
Some critics appreciate that there's an action fantasy for grown-ups.
"'Bright' transposes fantasy elements commonly found in kids’ entertainment to the world of heavy-duty adult action (for instance, its Fairies are nothing like Tinkerbell, but foul-mouthed pests with razor-sharp teeth). In the tradition of Dennis Hopper’s 'Colors,' Ayer has delivered another bloody, street-level cop movie, where even the most beloved characters can be shot, and the law is just a loose suggestion that folks on either side freely ignore.
If Netflix is the future of movies, it needs to do better.
"If this gambit pays off — if Netflix fortifies their assault on the theatrical experience by internally developing blockbuster-sized movies that are even semi-consciously optimized for disinterested audiences — then it’s hard to imagine how dark the future of feature-length filmmaking might be."
"Bright" is out Friday.
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