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There’s so much to say about what’s wrong with this lazy teen horror tale, but that would require devoting more thought to it than anyone who made it. On the surface, it’s basically Edge of Seventeen meets The Monkey’s Paw: Unhappy high-school student Clare (Joey King) starts to improve her status with the help of a strange Chinese “wishing box,” only to learn her wishes come with a cost. A slick little thriller might have been an interesting way to explore teen angst and learning to accept the pitfalls of life, with director John R. Leonetti (Annabelle) employing a few tension-building fake-outs before staging death scenes that feel more comedically over-the-top than scary. But the “rules” of the mystical wish-granting make no sense, and a connection between Clare’s story and that of her dead mother is left frustratingly unexplored. Most depressing of all, Wish Upon abandons its chance to be a genuine cautionary tale, apparently under the misguided notion that a cheap shock would be cooler. If you’re not going to be scary, coherent or have something thematically interesting to say, you’re just wasting 90 minutes of everyone’s time.
Official Site: www.wishuponmovie.com
Director: John R. Leonetti
Producer: Sherryl Clark, Gabriel Hammond and Daniel Hammond
Cast: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee, Mitchell Slaggert, Shannon Purser, Sydney Park, Elisabeth Röhm, Josephine Langford, Alexander Nunez, Daniela Barbosa, Kevin Hanchard, Sherilyn Fenn, Raegan Revord, Alice Lee, Victor Sutton and Albert Chung
Director: John R. Leonetti
Producer: Sherryl Clark, Gabriel Hammond and Daniel Hammond
Cast: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee, Mitchell Slaggert, Shannon Purser, Sydney Park, Elisabeth Röhm, Josephine Langford, Alexander Nunez, Daniela Barbosa, Kevin Hanchard, Sherilyn Fenn, Raegan Revord, Alice Lee, Victor Sutton and Albert Chung
