Poor Will Smith! Critics tore apart Netflix's first hopeful blockbuster, 'Bright'
Bright was Netflix's first attempt at a big-budget movie and critics have (mostly) taken to tearing it apart limb by limb, lambasting everything from the photography to the writing to the premise as a whole.
Directed by Suicide Squad's David Ayer and written by Victor Frankenstein's Max Landis, many critics felt the ambitious fantasy/cop movie, peppered with heavy-handed commentary on racism, fell flat on its face. There are a few reviewers and viewers that spoke favorably of Bright, but for the most part, the Will Smith-starring film has left many people wishing they had those two hours back.
Here are a few of the harshest reviews of Bright from critics and viewers who thought it was a failure of a movie.
Julia Alexander, Polygon:
Bright’s mishandling of sensitive topics that deserve to be handled with care is so mind boggling audacious that it quickly starts to feel like an insult to actual activism groups. There’s a scene at the beginning of Bright in which Smith’s all-American-bravado cop, Daryl Ward, is tasked with removing a pesky fairy hanging around his property. Fairies in the world of Bright are like mosquitos with personalities; hungry, menacing little creatures seen as a nuisance. Ward, broom in hand, prepares to kill the fairy, saying, "Fairy lives don’t matter today."
It’s borderline insulting, but what makes watching Bright so painful is how obvious it is that Landis and Ayer are trying to do right by the wrongdoings they see. Bright tries to identify the biggest issues facing society today and start a dialogue, but in doing so creates more problematic conversations.
Karen Han, Daily Beast:
Bright is a misnomer on two levels. First of all, the majority of Netflix’s new $90 million original movie takes place at night and in fairly dingy rooms, and that, in combination with how the whole production is lit, means that most of the action is obscured and visually unintelligible. Secondly, there’s nothing about this movie that’s an inherently good idea—or rather, very generously speaking, maybe the story could have made some valid points about the state of race relations in America with a little more thought. But as things stand, Bright plays like the kind of movie a kid might make up (“And then this happens! And then this happens!”) if they were given a very rough overview of American history and then told to write a script about it.
David Fear, Rolling Stone:
Kicking off with a montage featuring "Curse the Police" graffiti and murals of orcs with fists raised in the air, Bright wastes no time in setting up its magic + metaphor modus operandi and quickly pounding it in to the ground. Then, perhaps realizing that it has little to really say about racial relations or class divisions in America past "because, see, the orcs are like African-Americans in this scenario, you totally picked up on that, right?", the movie drops any attempt at using the conceit in the name of satire or incisiveness past an NFL dig or two.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Some critics — actually only about a handful — felt that the mix of Ayer and Landis was a match made in heaven, and the story of the film worked wonderfully. Some viewers also felt the movie was good and fun, although many included the caveat that it was, in fact, dumb.
Peter Debruge, Variety:
This ambitious, yet astonishingly well-executed Netflix tentpole directly benefits from the way Ayer’s gritty, streetwise sensibility grounds Landis’ gift for creating an elaborate comic-book mythology. “Bright” hinges on the relationship between two reluctantly paired police officers: battle-scarred beat cop Daryl Ward (Will Smith) and his idealistic new partner, Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), the first Orc ever allowed on the force. It’s a brilliant twist on an old dynamic that simultaneously supports an allegory about 21st-century discrimination so rich, you could create a college course dedicated solely to analyzing how it operates.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Luckily, if you have Netflix, you can watch Bright this weekend to escape the holidays for a bit and see for yourself.
