Bright Review: 3 Ups & 6 Downs
Downs...
6. Max Landis' Script Is A Hot Mess
Bright was written by Max Landis, so it's little surprise that the end product is a muddled mess of ideas, as was especially apparent in his screenplays for American Ultra and Victor Frankenstein back in 2015.
Landis' script for this movie is ambitious to a point, but it also fails to reconcile its various different genres - gritty cop thriller, fantasy adventure film and buddy cop comedy - into a coherent whole, resulting in a sloppy mash-up that just feels totally all over the place.
From the tone, which fleets from goofy to grimdark at the turn of a heel, to the total lack of character development for some of the film's more pivotal characters and its checklist of concepts cribbed from other, better movies, it feels like a film trying to please about half a dozen different types of audiences, but ultimately not fully satisfying any of them.