In an alternate present-day where magical creatures live among us, two L.A. cops, human Daryl Ward (Will Smith) and orc Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton) become embroiled in a prophesied turf battle as they try to protect elf Tikka (Lucy Fry) and her magic wand.

As a concept, Bright is interesting but unfortunately that doesn’t make the finished product interesting. Though it doesn’t go into detail, it’s clear that magical creatures have been a part of the world for centuries and humans, orcs, elves, fairies and presumably any other magical creature we don’t see in the film, have been coexisting that long. That means then that really the present-day world in the film should be at least a bit different to what we know in our world so references to things like Shrek just felt out of place.

Bright uses the differences between magical and human races to talk about racism, segregation and racial profiling but it’s very heavy handed which makes it both cringey and kind of insulting to the real-life situations it’s mirroring.

The conflict between Ward and Jakoby as they both don’t really trust or like one another which is typical to the buddy cop genre but unfortunately Smith and Edgerton don’t really have any chemistry. Normally when this kind of odd couple is clashing it’s entertaining but not here as Ward and Jakoby’s arguments seem to go on forever and the humour that’s supposed to be found in those scenes is nowhere to be found.

Once Ward and Jakoby discover Tikka, the plot of Bright basically becomes them going from A to B, trying to stay alive and keep Tikka safe as a variety of different people try to catch them and get the wand in Tikka’s possession. There’s orc gangs, human gangs, evil elves, corrupt cops and this world’s magical version of the FBI, on their trail. The plot could’ve been a bit tighter if one of those aspects was removed because at times it seemed like there was far too much going on, and the numerous shootouts didn’t leave a lot of time to flesh out the characters – especially Tikka who was mostly silently a lot of the time.

The action sequences in Bright are good, as is the make up on the various magical creatures, but unfortunately the characters aren’t interesting enough to make this film consistently entertaining. 2/5.