The clumsy and hamfisted approach to race relations is terrible when mixed with by the numbers buddy cop/fantasy prophecy script. You can have a mediocre element in your 90 million dollar film, but TWO? Come on! The script needed two revisions more to clean some slag and polish the analogies.
Talking about analogies, District 9 did a better job on race relations. I was really uncomfortable with orcs being sort of the feverish dreams of a racist redneck about “urban people”. Yeah, we get it, orcs are black people with a little make up and prosthetics. That’s fucking terrible.
This movie sorta tries to be a contemporary Shadowrun clone, but in Shadowrun the differences between races were not nearly as important as class stratification. If Bright tried to make a statement on real world problems it failed miserably.
The worldbuilding is interesting, the make-up is great, FX is nice. Dialogue lines are terrible… except for the Toyota line. That line was great. Sadly we all knew Smith would be the chosen one, so zero surprises.
PD: I found odd the editing of this film, shots were confusingly ordered or badly cut, usually too long without a reason to be, not a fine cut. (Disclaimer, I’m in the film industry and I look at details no one usually notices or cares)
They should have just removed the “today” and it becomes Ward just making a racially insensitive riff on “orc lives matter”, a phrase that would make a lot of sense in Bright’s world.
Like with the Shrek line, they could have had Jakobi angrily respond “that’s Spike Lee’s greatest movie!” But now I’m making a British version of Bright.
It reminded me of kids online who will claim they’re from someplace like Compton to seem “hard”. Because they’ve never been to Compton and they think it looks like an episode of Cops. This read like some dude who never left small-town Arkansas’ idea of what L.A. looks like.
Yeah, that was my feeling, too. He seemed seriously mis-cast. I don’t know how much influence he had in turning it into a quippy generic buddy cop movie, but his presence alone framed things that way. There was some tweet by the writer, before the movie got made, about how this was potentially his Star Wars. I wonder if he thought a buddy cop movie could be that, or that’s not what he wrote. It wouldn’t be the first time that a filmed movie bore little relation to the script.
I’ve seen worse. For example, there’s a scene in Jaws: the Revenge in which one character messes with his scuba-diving friend by singing the “duunnn dunnn… ” sounds from the original Jaws soundtrack.
In other words, the screenwriters posited a scenario in which the film Jaws I exists within the narrative universe of Jaws IV.
I didn’t take it that the Fairy was intelligent or that “Fairy Lives Matter” was a real-world slogan. I took it that “Orc Lives Matter” would be a slogan and Will’s character took that opportunity to turn it on it’s head and put in something that wasn’t usually said.
I imagine an equivalent would be “Rat Lives don’t matter today” when someone was killing a rat with a broom.
He’s just too big of a name for it. It’s like watching Tom Cruise*. You are hyper-aware that you are watching Tom Cruise or Will Smith and it’s distracting.
I can’t even grant you the exception. I have yet to see a movie with Tom Cruise where Tom Cruise isn’t playing Tom Cruise. The closest he’s ever come to not being Tom Cruise was in Tropic Thunder. I’m guessing Tom Cruise isn’t self aware enough to understand that Ben Stiller’s character was a total send up of Tom Cruise.
[I wonder if that’s enough mentions to summon him here again, because that was a hilarious couple days.]
This may be going back two comment systems ago, but in ancient times there was a BB piece on his cult that summoned someone with the exact type of diction he’s known for, and the community had a field day with that new, short lived account.
I think there’s some pretty good movies where it worked out very well for the fact that he’s Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise.
Magnolia, Vanilla Sky (one of the few re-Americanized movies I give a thumbs-up), Legend, etc.
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