Bright (2017)
Will Smith is one of the most frustrating actors working today, and I mean that in the most conflicted way possible. The man is either absolutely brilliant or completely terrible, with very little middle ground in between. I've felt that watching Hancock, I've felt it watching I Am Legend, and I felt it all over again sitting down with David Ayer's Bright. Sometimes the quality of what surrounds him is the deciding factor, and here, what surrounds him is a genuinely brilliant concept buried under a script that never quite earns it.
The setup is legitimately clever. It's an alternate version of modern-day Los Angeles where humans, orcs, fairies, and all manner of magical creatures coexist. Not in some far-off fantasy kingdom, but right there on the streets, in the squad cars, in the back alleys. The world-building alone had me hooked going in. There's real imagination in the bones of this thing, a kind of Lord of the Rings meets Training Day energy that, on paper, sounds like exactly the kind of fresh genre mashup I want more of.
So it's genuinely disappointing when the film starts to fall apart in the execution, because the problems aren't where you might expect them. The buddy-cop plot at the centre is fairly clichéd, sure, but that's fine. That's the genre. You don't need a wildly original story when the world itself is your hook. And the special effects are actually a real standout, doing a cracking job of bringing this diverse magical underworld to life with enough grit and texture to feel grounded. No, the issue is simpler and harder to fix: the delivery.
The dialogue is clunky in a way that keeps pulling you out of the film right when you want to lean in. Characters say things that sound like they belong in an early draft, lines that are trying to sound sharp and world-weary but land flat. And Ayer's direction, which can be so propulsive and alive in his better work, feels oddly uncertain here. The tone never settles. Is this a gritty police procedural? A high-fantasy adventure? A social allegory about race and class dressed up in orc prosthetics? It wants to be all three and ends up being none of them, really. The writing just lacks the sharp edge needed to make this alternate LA feel truly lived-in.
Joel Edgerton is doing solid work under what must have been considerable make-up, and Noomi Rapace is compelling whenever she's on screen, which isn't quite enough. Smith himself is somewhere in the middle of his register, neither phoning it in nor fully firing. There are flashes of the warmth and wit that made me love him in Men in Black, but they come and go.
This is something I've started to think of as Netflix original syndrome: the frustrating sense that one crucial piece is always missing. Usually it's the finale, a rushed or muddled ending that drains the goodwill built up over ninety minutes. Bright doesn't exactly fall into that trap, the ending isn't a disaster, but it doesn't do enough to pull the whole thing together either. The momentum never really builds to anything, and when the credits roll, you're left with the nagging feeling that a better version of this film exists somewhere and just didn't make it to the screen.
It's not entirely unwatchable. I've sat through far worse with far less going for it. But Bright is, at its most honest, a great premise trapped inside an average film. The concept deserved a sharper script, a more confident hand behind the camera, and a finished product that matched the ambition of its own world. Instead, it's a missed opportunity, and those are sometimes the hardest films to shake, not because they're bad, but because you can see so clearly what they could have been.
Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-06-19
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
