“Only a Bright can control the power of the wand”. That’s really how BRIGHT opens. Then we see “Curse the police” on a wall. Whatever its intention, Bright comes across as a massive piss-take of Black Lives Matter. Just in case the film was being too subtle, Will Smith says “Fairy lives don’t matter today” before beating it to death “LAPD style”. Then there’s “Are you a cop first or an orc first?” followed by the former beating the latter to a pulp curbside. 2017 was not the year to poke fun at institutional racism. This insults campaigners, victims and Police doing a difficult job in one fell swoop. Having a quietly racist black cop and references to diversity hires and diversification is about as deep as this gets, and that’s really surface-skimming stuff. Joel Edgerton does his best under inflexible prosthetics but Smith drifts and everyone else is buried under a pile of overacting, half-baked mythology and badly bungled social commentary. The hunt for Netflix’s big break in blockbuster filmmaking continues. SSP