Lindsay Ellis tells it how it is with Bright by stating just what’s wrong with the lazy world-building that takes place within the Netflix movie. There’s just too much within the movie that should have come earlier in the movie but is put off for so long, and by the time it does come around we’re already too bored to really get into it. Plus, the whole idea of Ward being this kind of loner with a bad attitude is wasted by the fact that he has a family he cares about. The whole idea of a cop that’s on the edge is that he doesn’t work when he has something to lose. Remember Riggs in Lethal Weapon? He was a guy on the edge and the movie was able to work since the idea was pushed forward.
There’s just nothing worthy of following in this film it seems since the audience isn’t really given a chance to care about anything or anyone. The mere fact that there was no screenwriter to Bright is one of the biggest, most glaring problems of the entire film since without a competent writer at the helm there really wasn’t a lot to go on. The movie suffered from the get go because no one sat down to pore over a screenplay that could have used a couple of rewrites at the very least. Why is this important? Oh I don’t know, maybe because if you want a movie to impress people by exploring the humanity and inner workings of what makes people tick it’s important to actually write a script that has a little feeling and isn’t just a bunch of lines written down describing what’s happening.
This is where the comparison to Crash really makes sense. Both films feature caricatures of people that are basic stereotypes that might exist in the world but are still tempered by very different attitudes that have different levels of depth than is shown in either movie. These films are basically what humanity would look like if we went off of our most base impulses and didn’t give much if any real thought to what we did or said. There’s no character development since everything is laid bare and the situations given are about as challenging as a three-year old’s drawing of Santa Clause. It might take you moment to figure it out, but once you get the idea then you’ve seen the entire picture and there’s nothing else there to decipher.
In terms of being entertaining both films have moments that are entertaining on a very basic scale but still don’t challenge the viewer at all as they prefer to force-feed the audience the material they’ve already decided to cover. Both movies really kind of phone it in and let you know what’s coming without much buildup to anything meaningful. Plus, and especially with Bright, the payoff that is promised by certain plot points and developments within the movie rarely ever comes, if at all. It’s almost half a bang for a lot of bucks in a way.
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