Bright / YMMV - TV Tropes

Adorkable: Jakoby is a walking, living personification of awkwardness. He tries really hard to come across as a friendly, funny guy to Ward, but only manages to annoy his partner with every ill-conceived joke he comes up with.
Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Did Leilah kill Larika to put her out of her misery after she was disfigured by the Wand's power or because she failed in her mission to assassinate Tikka for her?
- How much of Ward's hostility and distrust towards Jakoby is because he's returning to work with a rookie he barely knows and who lost the orc who shot him? Said orc is presumed to still be on the streets.
- Tikka's Ambiguously Gay moment when she is in the strip club looking at all the women: is her excitement from sexual attraction to any of the strippers, or is she marveling at the club's sights in general after being locked up in a cult for a long time? Is she experiencing the outside world for the first time after getting away from the Infernei, in much the same way one raised in a cult would be amazed at a society they know nothing about? It could easily be both.
- Was Mikey, Dorghu's son, a deliberate accessory to Ward's wounding? He wasn't the trigger hand but the lookout, which would make Nick's mixup an intentional trick. Both Mikey and the shooter wore similar outfits as a way to throw off pursuit. What are the odds that the son of an orc gangster just happens to be in the same area as a police shooting of a cop by a orc?
- Kandomere is secretly a member of the Shield of Light. The Badass Creed of the Shield of Light is "Blessed Be the Shield of Light. He who stands behind me, I will protect. He who stands beside me will be my brother for life. He who stands against me, I will destroy" (Rough transcription based off the 5 seconds the graffiti inside the lair is displayed). During the interrogation of the prophet, Kandomere says to him that anyone who stands against me becomes my enemy. The prophet starts cooperating afterwards. Kandomere's words sound like he's echoing the Shield of Light's own words. While he could be bullying the prophet into cooperating, he could also be tipping him off.
Anvilicious: The film's handling of racial issues and aesops. One of the biggest issues isn't just that it's unsubtle and problematic, it's also thematically irrelevant to the actual driving plot, which is an otherwise standard "find the MacGuffin" story that could've existed without it (which, curiously enough, was in fact the case with the initial Max Landis drafts).
Awesome Music:
- Logic and Rag'n'Bone Man's "Broken People" playing during the opening credits.
- "Home" by Machine Gun Kelly, X Ambassadors, and Bebe Rexha playing over the end credits. The music video features cameos of Hicks, Brown, and Dorghu.
- "World Gone Mad", a Bastille song that plays when Ward shoots the other cops, is an incredibly affecting song about the problems in the world, with amazing falsetto from lead singer Dan Smith.
Bile Fascination: Subverted. Because critics gave the film absolutely scathing reviews, many people saw it just to see how bad the film really was, with a decent portion of them instead coming out having enjoyed it.
Critical Dissonance: On Rotten Tomatoes, Bright has an audience score over 80% compared to a critic score which is in the mid 20s. The general trend is that if you err on being critical, the politics, clunky plot, and cliche'd, unpleasant world will turn you off, but if you come for action, fun chemistry between the two leads, and overall don't take it that seriously, it's more enjoyable.
Don't Shoot the Message: The general message of the film is that racism is bad. However, numerous viewers and critics found its handling of that message to be sloppy at best and offensive at worst. Commonly criticisms include the fact that both Fantastic Racism and historical racism exist in Bright's world, which makes little sense. Another point of contention for some critics is that the racism toward orcs (culturally equated to African-Americans, Jews, and Mexicans) are both based on Sins of the Father that the race committed and can't live it down, with an unwillingness by other races to forgive them. This is seen as insulting towards real-life races who were historically oppressed through little fault of their own, especially since the Elves (used as an allegory for the powerful elite) seemingly did nothing wrong aside from being Upper Class Twits.
Fandom Rivalry:
- To a certain extent with Zootopia given that both are cop thrillers that made use of Fantastic Racism. Most reviews that compare the two like to snark that the animated PG-rated kids' movie treated contemporary issues of race and bigotry with more sensitivity and nuance than the gritty live-action film.
- Rather unexpectedly formed one with The Last Jedi, since both movies were released around the same time that suffered reverse cases of Critical Dissonance with critics loving The Last Jedi and panning Bright, while audiences are more divided over both.
- Fans of Blade Runner 2049 and of this film don't get along, due to more people seeing the latter and making it a ratings hit, while the former was critically acclaimed and has a strong fanbase but was a Box Office Bomb.
Fanfic Fuel: Since the backstory isn't explored much, many fans like to theorize how different historical events like World War II panned out in this world where elves, orcs and other beings existed alongside mankind since the dawn of time.
Fan Nickname:
- "Grand Theft Lord of the Rings"
- "Straight Outta Tolkien"
- "Shadowrun: The Movie"
- "Orc Cops"
- "Orc Nation"
Heartwarming Moments: Jakoby rushing back into the fire to get Ward out towards the end.
Iron Woobie: Jakoby is treated with disdain and disgust by both his fellow cops and orcs alike for different reasons. He's well aware of Ward not wanting to be his partner. And he takes it all in stride.
Jerkass Woobie: Ward. He's abrasive, often insulting towards Jakoby and desperately wants to switch partners, and has some degree of prejudice and racism against orcs himself despite professing his view that all races are equal. However, he's apparently just as unpopular as Jakoby given that nobody wants to partner with him, he's drowning in debt, and his abrasiveness towards Jakoby (as well as his desperation to switch partners) is partly down to the trauma of having been shot by an as-yet-uncaught orc and still struggling with the resulting PTSD.
Memetic Mutation:
- "Coming to Netflix December Twenthy-Tooth", based on a typo in the description for the official Youtube video of the trailer.
- The Shrek reference mentioned below has led to a lot of viewers wondering whether Shrek is a historical drama in this universe.
Moral Event Horizon: Any possibility of Leilah and her crew being in any way sympathetic are obliterated when they slaughter an innocent family, along with a crying infant for no reason whatsoever.
Narm:
- The encounter with the Sword guy sets the standard, really. Not only is he swinging it around at nothing but air, with no one even close to him, without it, he looks like a regular hobo. And the moment Ward orders him to drop the sword, he does so with no resistance.
- Then when Nick cuffs him, he complains that he was "just having fun", instead of trying to warn everyone about the Dark Lord's return.
- Ward killing the corrupt cops is made silly by the slow-sounding Bastille song playing with the lyrics, "You don't want to fuck with us/British to the very last" as the scene plays dramatically.
- This line was meant to be horrifically racist on Ward's part and yet...:
Ward: Take your FAT, Shrek-lookin' ass BACK to your vehicle and drive the FUCK home to Fiona!
- "Fairy lives don't matter today."
- Deputy Rodriguez stating that Mexicans "still receive shit for the fuckin' Alamo" for possible dissonance in historical racism coexisting with the Fantastic Racism against the fantasy creatures of this movie.
- Montehugh calling brights "fairy fucking tales" sounds incredibly stupid due to the irony brought on by that line in this movie's context.
- Whenever someone references the Dark Lord in all dramatic seriousness despite being dead for thousands of years, without giving him a name or a different title which is as silly as people today only referring to Adolf Hitler as 'The Leader'.
- For anyone familiar with Indian cuisine, Tikka's name can be hard to take seriously.
- Officer Pollard marvels at the wand's power, noting all the things you could do with it. Unfortunately, he lists such juvenile examples such as making his dick bigger. Even if that's your first thought when faced with such supreme power, why would you say that out loud to everyone else?
Nightmare Fuel: Pretty much everything about Leilah reeks of this. Her associates aren't any less terrifying: Serafin in particular... well, we're kinda glad we don't see what he did to that baby. The three of them seem to exemplify the most horrifying, sociopathic, sadistic tendencies of Elves in this setting, and then actively seek to surpass them.
No Yay: Leilah's interactions with Tikka especially in the climax are way too intimate and creepy, made worse by the fact that she's Tikka's sister.
One-Scene Wonder: Dorghu is this as he basically spells out the situation for orcs in Los Angeles. Treated like scum and forced into poverty by society, he became a criminal because it was his only option and yet still tried to make peace between the various factions on the street both human as well as orc. It was working, too, and they were building real bridges until our heroes end up shooting up his party and making it an unsafe place for everyone.
Spiritual Adaptation:
- A fictional social commentary about fantastic racial tensions in a deconstructed supernatural-meets-real Urban Fantasy setting that gets hijacked by a plotline about corrupt cops, gangsters, and professional killers trying to seize a powerful artifact with two ordinary men of differing species and their plucky kid friend trying to keep it away from them and survive, followed by lots and lots of bullets, gore, and supernatural explosions? Sounds like District 9, except replace aliens with fantasy.
- Humans living side-by-side with Elves and Orcs in an Urban Fantasy setting where magic is an everyday hazard? Sounds an awful lot like a Shadowrun movie.
- A cop hunting fairy tale-like creatures and siding with one of them? Basically Grimm as a movie.
- Gunfights, car chases, fantasy creatures, and magic? Sounds more than a little like The Grimnoir Chronicles, albeit in the present day rather than the 1930s.
- It's been joked by a few that this movie is Theodore Rex done right. Both movies are buddy cop films between a black person and a non-human creature and both deal with Fantastic Racism between the two different species they're a part of.
- Some people say that this film is what Zootopia would have been if it had humans and fantastic creatures. Hell, they even share a main character with the same name (Nick) and similar tragic backstory. Both films have a character who wanted to be a cop since their youth. They even share a plot point where a police officer saves the mobster's child, which saves them when facing death down a hole in the floor of the mobster's lair.
- To Alien Nation: The setting is a world that humans are unhappy to share with other sentient species, used as an allegory for racism. The main character is a human cop who is racist against non-humans because one of them killed his partner. He's paired with a new non-human partner who is hairless, physically strong, and the first member of his race to be a cop. They must work together in spite of their differences to fight a non-human conspiracy.
- To Ugly Americans, which also had fantasy creatures exist alongside normal humans in a modern day American city, albeit Played for Laughs.
Special Effects Failure: When Jakoby and Ward kill Leilah's female minion via Grenade Tag, there's a CGI particle effect of her disintegrating that doesn't look anything like an explosion. It looks like the effect was intended to go with someone being killed by the Magic Wand and someone instead decided to use it there instead of a practical or CGI explosion.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Essentially, a lot of people felt the action movie plot of keeping the Macguffin from the bad guys and Always Save the Girl was less interesting than exploring the world of orc gangs, elven elite, and how the LAPD navigates between them. It's basically a standard (fantasy) action movie which uses its Fantastic Racism setting as a backdrop.
- The movie keeps making a lot of references to "the Dark Lord" who forced the 9 races to unite 2,000 years ago and how an "unblooded orc farmer" was the one who led the rebellion, standard fantasy backstory. Nothing of this matters to the plot at all. Orcs don't have their own religion of the farmer who led their freedom, the Dark Lord is only used in a way to show that orcs are untrustworthy, and any attempt at an Alternate History is not even acknowledged. The setting is modern Los Angeles with fantasy races in it and that's it.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A common criticism is that the setting is too bleak due to its extreme prejudice and bigotry.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: Joel Edgerton rises above the material to give a very sincere and touching performance. Bonus points for doing so underneath all that makeup.
Trapped by Mountain Lions: The racism allegories were added into the script in a later draft and have little to do with the main plot of keeping the MacGuffin away from a doomsday cult.
- As Lindsay Ellis pointed out in her thrashing of the film, the film is full of random, gratuitous action scenes which have little connection with the rest of the plot and rarely pay off in any way.
Unconventional Learning Experience: Bright is cited as a rather good case study in Worldbuilding and Show, Don't Tell... or rather, what not to do in regards to those. Many lengthy criticisms of the film bring up the sloppy attempts at lore, noting how the setting makes no sense and the exposition dumped on the viewers only raises more questions than answers them, and not in a good way.
The Woobie: Tikka, due to being constantly terrified of the assassins pursuing her as well as who else wants her wand for themselves.

YMMV / Bright

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