LAPD buddy-cop meets Urban Fantasy in this District-9 style supernatural thriller that’s way better than it sounds. Unless it sounds cool, to you, in which case, you better check it out. Urban Fantasy (think Lord of the Rings but in contemporary settings) is still kinda making it’s way to the mainstream and I think a few critics out there just aren’t quite getting it yet. But for those in the know, or just not so genre-judgmental, Bright has all the makings of a sleeper hit. It’s got grit, banter, suspense and action layered beneath a compellingly creative social metaphor. But really it’s just a fun, incredibly well-executed Will Smith police procedural. With magic. Netflix has made a good show of spending money before. Marco Polo, Sense8, The Get Down and The Crown have all been marketed as obnoxiously expensive series. But their direct-to-streaming movies have been more of the middle-to-low budget variety. Until Bright. By all accounts, this should’ve released in theaters. But between Justice League and Star Wars and whatever Duane Johnson is up to these days, there isn’t much room left to breath at the multiplex. Cue Netflix with their deep coffers and built-in audience base. Why go out in the cold when you can cozy up over the holidays and watch Will Smith? Afterall, your subscription’s already paid through the month, right?
Will Smith is a five-years-from-retirement cop assigned against his will to the unwanted affirmative-action minority orc partner (Joel Edgerton climbing the Hollywood Ladder). Who promptly gets him shot. Smith is no saint. He hates the guy as much as his precinct, but their affable banter penetrates that wannabe tough exterior and they can’t help having chemistry despite themselves. The first act features such lines as, “Fairy Lives don’t matter today,” and “Do that LAPD thing,” in reference to violence. Will Smith chastises his dimwitted orc partner over letting the guy who shot him get away while he was buying a burrito. “Your burrito,” the partner protests. But when his pals around the precinct give him grief to get rid of him, he stands up to them. He may not like the guy, but he’ll be darned if he’s gonna let them push him around. The dynamic establishes his seniority and internal self-confidence as well as his tenuous working relationships all around. The dialogue is subtle, ambiguous and nuanced as we wonder whether these two will bond together or come to blows first. As good as any NYBD Blue episode (or The Shield for that matter) and yet as playful as Lethal Weapon, Bright works best as a cop movie first. The fantasy is just for set dressing. The elves are the upper class bourgeois ruling the city from the skyscapers while the orcs are the low-class minorities of the streets, hated and mistrusted for their tribal allegiances. Fairies are just annoying little rodents, for all intents and purposes. You might catch a centaur in the background. And humans are humans. Unless they’re Bright. Blessed. Magical. They're just on routine, bouncing around the various corners of the city (foreshadowing the different districts their inevitable troubles will take them through), when they get a call. They respond to the call as casually as any other. Until they find the bodies. And a wand. That's right, a magic wand. Mystical. Powerful Rare. Wanted by all factions. And an elf-girl on the run. They're in over their heads. The human gangs, the orc gangs, the elf Illuminati ("Actually they killed the Illuminati two centuries ago,") and the FBI Magic Division, to say nothing of some dirty cops, all want the wand. The plot begins to resemble End of Watch (another sleeper by Director David Ayer) in all the best ways. These two partners have to survive the night, one hopeless looking incident after another, as they refuse to yield to increasingly overwhelming odds and all different kinds of bad guys. “I think we might be in a prophecy,” Edgerton's Ord Jakoby says at one point. “We’re not in a prophecy, we’re in a stolen Toyota Corolla,” Smith replies. Another great shootout sequence goes something like: “You alright? Got any holes?” “Only the holes I was born with. How are your holes?” “Only you could make a shootout awkward.” The Hard-R style is reminiscent of the fun to be found in films like Dredd (the good one with Karl Urban) or John Wick. Barely a bit of nudity, some usual swearing and gun-shooting. I don't think Netflix technically even rates their movies, or needs to. But the re-emergence of the so-called "Hard-R" concept is more of an aesthetic. It's dark. It's messy. It's violent and bad people do bad things sometimes. But mostly it's an implication that you can get a break from the goofball action-comedy crap of Marvel or mainstream teen-friendly blockbusters if you're sick of those. In this case, it's exactly the right choice. I was worried the film with get too grand or epic in its attempts to increase the drama and action, the way most of Hollywood big budget genre films have gone these last few years. Something with a gray CGI monster and a beam of light in the sky. But by keeping the budget just under a hundred million, they're free to keep it small and intimate in scale. A lesson for the blockbusters out there, it actually enhances the drama and focuses the plot on the characters that matter in more realistic and suspenseful ways. Ayer has been getting a of negative reviews for this film and I think it's just spillover for his botched job on Suicide Squad a year ago. That film was a case study in how not to write or direct a film and it made Ayer look like a total amateur (he's admitted to being self-taught). But Bright is brilliantly executed at every level, more akin to his indie work on End of Watch. Maybe all this cop stuff is just his forte and he should stay away from the meddling producers at Warner Brothers who can't seem to manage their DC comics properties. All I can say is that I'm not surprised Netflix has green-lit a sequel already. I don't know how exactly they make money with these movies when the people watching them have already paid, but this has the makings of a real franchise. Conclusion: Will Smith's best movie in years is essentially free because everyone has Netflix. Well written, snappy dialogue, complex and conflicted characters, dramatic and suspensefully staged confrontations all set within a subgenre normally reserved for YA novels but twisted dark for adults a la Game of Thrones. The humor is funny but not stupid or obtrusive. The world-building is succinct and simple yet rife with subtle implications. And to be perfectly honest, this was just a very tight, original and entertaining movie in a world where those have gotten rare. I thought it looked dumb at first glance and a lot of Netflix films are hit or miss but trust me, this was a winner.
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