Review – Wish Upon

Wish Upon is about a teenage girl named Clare (Joey King) who receives an ancient box that will magically grant her seven wishes.  However, with each wish, somebody close to her dies, which causes Clare into a downward spiral or paranoia, greed, and stupidity.

I am not going to break this movie down like I usually do in my reviews.  Instead, I am going list seven wishes that I wish for this movie.  These are things that I wish happened in the movie and things I wish will happen to the people that are part of this movie.

1 – I WISH: Joey King would make better career choices.

• Joey King has done some solid work in her young career.  She was excellent in The Conjuring (2013), was one of the better parts of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), and was simply delightful in this year’s Going In Style (2017).  This is her first starring role and it’s not a good one.  I don’t want King to fall into a trend of starring in terrible horror movies.  She wasn’t given much to work with here and the direction of the movie is terrible.  She tries, but nothing works.  Use your talents and charisma on better material, King.  It’ll help you down the line.

2 – I WISH: Ryan Philipe would get his career together.

• Ryan Philipe is an actor who’s sheer presence makes me chuckle.  Not because he’s a funny actor, but because he just randomly shows up in things.  I had no idea he was in this movie, but when I saw him as Clare’s dad, an unintentional small laugh came out of me. Philipe isn’t a bad actor, he’s actually one of the aspects of Wish Upon that isn’t horrible, but I don’t know what he’s doing here.  He needs a new agent and get some good projects under his belt.  Maybe an indie film or something that is the exact opposite of this garbage.

3 – I WISH: The guy who plays Paul never gets another acting role.

• Easily the worst part of Wish Upon is the character of Paul, played by Mitchell Slaggert.  Paul is the attractive popular boy in school whom Clare wishes would fall madly in love with her.  If there is one of the actual wishes I hope comes true, it is this one.  Slaggert is an insult to the art of acting.  Paul isn’t a great character, but Slaggert makes him even worse.  This is a whole new level of horrible line reading, douchebaggery, and just awfulness.  The entire movie I was hoping Paul would die and much to my disappointment, he doesn’t (Spoiler?  Meh).  This is easily one of the worst performances I have ever seen.

4 – I WISH: This movie actually knew what it was doing.

• I think whomever wrote Wish Upon started off with a decent idea.  I think this movie wanted to be a new Final Destination (2000) of sorts, where random characters die in bizarre fashions from an uncontrollable spirit.  However, this movie got too confusing for its own good.  There are so many plot holes in this movie, you could probably make a whole new putting all those holes together.  There were so many characters and side-stories that get glossed over and the mystery of the box is just thrown on the back-burner.  This is an incomplete idea that would have been pretty cool had it been done right.

5 – I WISH: This movie was scary and not funny.

• I think this is the first horror movie I have seen in theaters where there were more laughs than jumps or screams.  In my years of desensitizing myself with horror movies, I don’t get scared too often, but I do take note of scenes when the rest of the audience does.  I cannot recall a single scene where everyone jumped or screamed.  I can recall, however, a number of scenes where myself and the audience laughed.  What kind of horror movie gets more laughs than some comedies?  A bad one is what kind.

6 – I WISH: This movie was rated R.

• Look, if you’re going to have an incomplete story with a ton of plot holes and not be scary at all, can we at least get some gratuitous blood and gore?  The deaths in this movie are really cool, and include a woman being impaled by a random horn, someone getting decapitated by a chainsaw, and someone being crushed in an elevator.  However, we never see them!  We either see the aftermath of the death or the scene quickly cuts away to something else and then we see the body.  Give me the bloody and gore so I can have something fun to see.

7 – I WISH: I never saw this movie.

Did you see Wish Upon?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, and on Facebook by searching Kevflix.