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WISH UPON

ONE OF CLARE'S LOVED ONES DIE EVERY TIME SHE MAKES A WISH. CLARE DOES NOT CARE.



★★☆☆☆ (Don’t Bother)

Director: John R. Leonetti

2017


On a beautiful day, in a quiet neighborhood, a woman puts a mysterious package in her garbage in the most mysterious way possible. After she bids her young daughter Clare farewell, the woman hangs herself in her attic, and this is the introduction to the formulaic Wish Upon, a monkey’s paw movie that doesn’t give you anything new, and is only slightly better than Conjuring the Genie (1 star). A film is like a food recipe; the concept here—a teenage Clare finds a Chinese wish box and every time she makes a wish, someone dies—is a simplistic base that can handle many interesting details. Unfortunately, there are no scares, the kills are stupid, Clare’s behavior is horrifying, and it feels like a space alien who studied spooky movies wrote the script. Or that it was written in the year 2002. Either way, you will either be amused or bored with such lines as, “She’s a super smegma!”


WARNING: SPOILERS. At the start of the film, Clare (Joey King) is a Pollyanna, a Mary Sue, a teen pure of heart who rescues baby birds and greets her neighbors every morning. But Clare is also a girl with many problems. Sure, she lives in a decent old house and has nice clothes and two best friends, but she wants more. She wants her father to stop looking into other people’s trash for treasure. Hoarding isn’t like American Pickers, it’s a serious mental disorder that doesn’t respond well to treatment. And it enrages Clare like nothing else.


Someone in Wish Upon calls Ryan Phillippe’s character “Dumpster Daddy”, so that’s how I’ll be addressing him from now on. One day, Dumpster Daddy digs through the receptacles by the high school, leading to a humiliated Clare marching over to give him a tongue lashing. Never mind that if she just left him alone, no one would notice him or know he was her father. To make up for this blunder, Dumpster Daddy gives Clare a strange “music box” found during his hunt, and this is when her real troubles begin.



Actually, Clare’s trouble began earlier in the day. After confronting her bully Darcy in the cafeteria (and calling her a super smegma), there’s a righteous cat fight, and this is when I felt good about our protagonist; this shows she may be adorable, but she won’t put up with anyone’s crap. Too bad the writer’s don’t know how an arc works, because once the wishes start flowing, Clare goes from a scrappy sweetheart to a sociopathic murderer. It’s as if our hero gets a full lobotomy in the middle of the film. The first wish is that Darcy starts to rot, and wouldn’t you know it, the pretty girl’s skin starts to fall off. Instead of saying, “uh oh”, Clare is thrilled her new toy works and proceeds to make herself wealthy so she can buy $800 purses for herself and her friends. Never mind that her dog died after the first wish. Or that her uncle died after the second. Or that the neighbor lady she supposedly loved died after the third. Clare MUST be rich and popular and get the boy she wants.


Even after she figures out what’s going on, and the bodies start piling up, Clare still clings to her murder box without having one moment of clarity or remorse. Just because she mutters, “It’s my fault” once and without emotion doesn’t mean we buy that she cares at all. Perhaps Wish Upon was supposed to be a serial killer origin story. None of the deaths are on the radar of law enforcement, by the way. We see a cruiser and some officers in the distance, but none question Clare or the sudden rash of deaths of people in her sphere. Then there’s the set-up for the kills. Who puts their hand and face in a garbage disposal?


Let’s look at the rules. Though a wish is made and someone dies, we’re never told how or why that person is chosen. We’re led to believe that they’re someone Clare cares about, but then someone she met five minutes ago is eliminated. As for the wishes, they’re ones made by a small child. There’s no thought or nuance. As one of her friends wisely points out, Clare could have wished for world peace or the cure for cancer—we know our heroine is a jerk, don’t rub it in. Her thoughtless decisions do lead to some hilarious moments, though. When Clare wishes her father was “cool”, he goes from Dumpster Daddy to Man with Saxophone. As he plays his sax with all the smooth sexiness of Bill Clinton on The Arsenio Hall Show, one of Clare’s fawning teenage friends murmurs, “Your dad is serious hot sauce. Like, Siracha hot.” This movie came out in 2017.



The big twist is supposed to be that Clare’s mother threw the wish box away before she died (no shit), but do you know the odds of Clare’s father finding the same box ten years later? Common sense doesn’t exist in this world. In this world, when someone you care about kicks the bucket, you forget about them in a day. In this world, popularity means your teenage peers applaud you as you walk through a house party.


The last five seconds of Wish Upon may be comedy gold, but the only scary thing about the film is that this dumpster daddy of a fire got greenlit. The character of Clare has the emotional intelligence of an infant. When she gets caught being selfish, she whines and cries. When she wants something, she pouts and whines. When someone tells her the wishes are killing people, she shrugs. There’s one scene where she runs to her room and growls like a dog at the wish box. Joey King was so great in season one of Fargo, but utilized the wrong way, with a bad director, she’s a mess. Leonetti committed the exact same crime against my beloved Kiernan Shipka in The Silence. “I think you’re a selfish bowl of bitch sauce!” one character says to Clare. Yes. Yes, she is.





GENRES: Diverse Characters, Funny, Psychological, Teens in Peril


NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.



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