It takes less than an hour for Netflix’s Bright to confirm itself a work of staggering, barking magnificence. With the 60 minute mark onrushing, Will Smith’s human LAPD detective Daryl Ward and his orc partner Nick Jakoby, played with the straightest face of all time by Australian actor Joel Edgerton, are on the run with a MacGuffin-esque magic wand. Accompanied by Lucy Fry’s magical-thinking elf, Tikka, they flee to a dingy night club where a heavy metal orc band is whipping up a mosh-pit.

Next, a rival gang of crazed, deeply stereotypical Latino gangsters crashes the party, spraying the room with semi-automatic gunfire. As shot by director David Ayer the scene plays like a frothing-at-the-chops mash-up of Michael Mann’s Heat and the Mines of Moria slug-fest in The Lord of the Rings, with light sprinklings of Boyz n the Hood and the Michael Jackson Bad video. I don’t know about you, but at home on my couch I was hugging my box of Quality Street with glee. When Netflix announced Smith, Edgerton and Ayer are to return for a Bright sequel I was tempted to do a jig all over again.

In a year in which the streaming goliath has lurched between crisis (the unravelling of Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards), disaster (Gypsy, Girlboss), and critical success (Godless), Bright may have been its biggest news story of all. Loathed at an almost existential level by reviewers (Rotten Tomatoes score: 28 per cent), the $90 million dollar fantasy action flick has proved a surprise juggernaut – the pre-Christmas gift that kept on giving.