Bright is essentially Training Day, if Training Day had been written by a time-traveling Holly Black who knew about 2017’s disparate Black Lives/Blue Lives Matter movements.
David Ayer’s Bright is one of those movies that you kinda forget is happening, and then something reminds you and in a flash you remember exactly how bizarre it all sounds. The first trailer for the new Netflix movie dropped this evening at Comic Con, and, oh boy, you are not prepared for this at all.
David Ayer, director of the newly-minted Academy Award-winner Suicide Squad (there’s a phrase I don't ever see my fingers getting comfortable with), has already begun work on his next film. Will the new project Bright also win an Academy Award like Suicide Squad did last night, which was real and not a dream we all had? We have no way of knowing, but it could happen. Evidently anything can happen, because Suicide Squad won an Academy Award last night. As in, one more award than Martin Scorsese’s career-defining religious epic Silence. So today, look upon the first teaser for Bright and bow before your new King of Oscars, for it is David Ayer.
Following through on the soupy metaphysics and syrupy emotionality of past projects Seven Pounds and The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith completes his “All Along, the Meaning of Life… Was Love” trilogy on December 16 with David Frankel’s Collateral Beauty. A new trailer for the inspirational/”inspirational” morality play has surfaced online today, and it contains all the sky-high emotions, A Christmas Carol-but-with-a-soul narrative structuring, and elaborate domino structures that audiences would expect. It could certainly use more footage of Smith playing with dominos, but then, what movie couldn’t?
The trailers for Suicide Squad have done a fairly good job of letting each member of Task Force X shine, though they have leaned a bit more heavily on Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Jared Leto’s Joker — at least they know their target audience. But these new clips help us get to know some of the other major characters from David Ayer’s DC super-villain ensemble, like Will Smith’s Deadshot and Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller.