New Bright featurette delves into characters & gritty, magical action

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

David Ayer is the mind behind some fantastic cop dramas like TRAINING DAY and END OF WATCH, and he’ll be in similar territory with the upcoming Netflix release, BRIGHT. Only this time, he cranks everything up to 11, then 12, and then rips the damn nob off and says, “F@ck it! Let’s throw Orcs and wizards and wands and anything we want in there.” The result is a crazy-looking fantasy-cop-drama starring Will Smith as a regular L.A.P.D. officer with an Orc for a partner, played by Joel Edgerton. The first trailer gave us a taste of this unique mash-up, and now you can get the best look yet at the movie with a new featurette that explores the characters and story, and shows a ton of new footage along the way. Yes, Orcs get bullied too. I think the LORD OF THE RINGS movies gave them a bad name.

Something tells me the fantasy angle would make this a hard sell in theaters, but on Netflix, this seems like a perfect way to showcase something wildly different from any sort of cop movie we've seen before. Ayer really seems to have fleshed out a grounded, modern world where mythical creatures are very real but are treated like second-class citizens. There are certainly themes of race relations brewing here, but the fantasy elements give a new spin that makes it worth checking out. I wasn't sure about the movie when it was first in development, but everything I see intrigues me more and more, and now I've seen enough to picture the movie as something like END OF WATCH, but if you replaced one-half of the Michael Pena–Jake Gyllenhaal team with an Orc. How does that not sound cool?

BRIGHT hits Netflix December 22.