Watching ‘Bright’ With My Mom, A Person Who Should Like This Film No Matter What

Critics don’t seem to like the new Netflix flick Bright very much. It’s been called “embarrassing,” “profoundly awful,” and “the worst movie of 2017.” But is Bright really made for the critics? Or was it intended for a looser, more loving audience? What about the kind of movie-goer who gobbles up fantasy worlds without asking questions? You know, like…my mom.
My mother is a film fanatic, but she specifically likes science fiction fare and balls-to-the-wall action flicks. She is the person who made me watch the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner as a tween (for my education), but my mom also dragged me to a screening of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. My critical opinion is that Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is a terrible film that I’m convinced was written by a home-schooled teen who knows a lot about the military police, but nothing about how adults interact with one another. My mom thought it was okay. What I’m saying is my mother likes movies and she likes them rather indiscriminately. So Bright was quite possibly made for her.
So what would my mother make of Bright? Well, it’s Christmas-time, and at Christmas, families come together to watch movies on the couch, so we watched Bright.
At first, my mother was excited to watch a new film on Netflix. She was engaged and asking questions like, “What’s this called? Bright?” and “Are the orcs all bad?” and “Can you turn the volume up?” However, by the time we meet Edgar Ramirez and Happy Anderson‘s magic-hunting feds, she turned to me and said, “This is ridiculous.” She followed this up with a brutal critique: “I think the acting’s lousy!” And her mood only got worse once the magic wand made its debut, when she literally made this legendary face:

And when Ike Barenholtz talks about using the wand to marry the girl who wouldn’t blow him on prom night, my mom was shaking her head like a great injustice had befallen. I tried to lighten the mood by joking, “I think there are more curse words than adjectives in the dialogue.” My mom immediately agreed and said, “The script is…” and then she invoked the spirits of both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and slowly turned her thumb down, like a vicious Roman Empress deciding to feed Bright‘s controversial screenwriter Max Landis to the lions. She added, “I could write a better script than this! All you had to do was make every other word the f-bomb!”
My mom only got more ruthless after that. In the meant-to-be-dramatic moment wherein Will Smith‘s Ward turns on his cruel cop buddies, my mom sharply exclaimed, “This is a cheap, cheap movie! It’s not even a b-movie!” And then she said something mean about the band Bastille. She sat in disappointed silence for the rest of the film, sighing often and looking at me not like she wished I had never been born, but as though she was sad to have raised a child who could subject her to Bright at Christmastime.

As for me? Well, I thought it was boring. I don’t know how you make street battles between orc clans and cops and blue-haired elves boring, but it happened. I just didn’t care about Ward. I didn’t care about his problems, and I certainly didn’t care for his one-dimensional wife (who seemed to be re-cast halfway through? She was a blonde nurse and then a brunette vamp?) Besides that, I had the same frustrations with Bright that I did with David Ayer‘s last collaboration with Will Smith: Suicide Squad. Like the maligned super-villain romp, this film was a narrative mess. Also, it was entirely too self-serious. A film with orcs, elves, fairies, and centaurs living among us — where dragons swoop over a city bathed in moonlight — should have some sense of…wonder, if not whimsy.
Finally, and this is what pissed me off the most, there are some good ideas in Bright, but they’re wasted in this film. An urban-fantasy about a Los Angeles teetering on the edge of a magical war is cool! So is the world-building that went into the orcs, and the magical feds, and Elf Town, and all that stuff. There are good ideas, but they feel half-baked, if not extraneous. So when all is said and done, this is the worst kind of “bad movie.” It’s the film stuck in a limbo between safe action fantasy and balls-to-the-walls outlandish exuberance. Meaning, it doesn’t entertain you well enough for you to feel entertained by the film, nor is it wild or crazy enough to make for a hate-watch.
When the film was over, I asked my mom if she would recommend Bright to someone else. After a pause she said, “If you’re really, really in a bad way and you’re bored.” Honestly, I sadly have to concur.

That said, she also came to me about 20 minutes later and sagely said, “I think it would have worked better as a miniseries.” Her logic was that the film, even though it hammers home the racial metaphors of orcs and elves, does little to explain what’s going on in regards to the details of the world. “Something was missing,” she said. “It was a lot more interesting towards the end once you had a feel for what was going on.”
And now I have to spend Christmas debating whether or not I should tell my mother Netflix has already ordered a Bright sequel.

Stream Bright on Netflix