Wish Upon

It was such a fun film to watch, although not scary it was tense and comedic in just the right places. It's the perfect mix between final destination and mean girls

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

If there's one thing this movie gets right it's the cast. Shannon Purser, Ki Hong Lee, Ryan Phillippe, Sydney Park and more. All very charismatic. Towering high of above each and every one of them though is the star of the show, Joey King. No longer the ridiculously talented little girl we once knew, she's grown into an incredibly gifted young actress. So much so that I wish there was a better movie around her. Wish Upon puts a gruesome spin on a typical high-school movie formula. The protagonist finds a means of making all her wildest fantasies come true. Popularity, her dream crush, a lavish lifestyle, and a cooler dad all become hers in the blink of an eye. Only rather than finding out all of these things she thought she wanted don't actually bring her happiness, she instead must deal with the fact that getting everything she's ever wanted is causing people to die. The deaths themselves are rather tepid. As if director John R. Leonetti was afraid to do anything really gruesome because he knew we don't actually want to see most of these people meet a violent end. The thing that's allowed gory horror series like Final Destination to succeed is that we don't really care about anyone onscreen. We may not necessarily dislike them, but there's a certain detachment that makes it easy to revel in their inevitable demise. When someone gets killed here it's just disappointing to see them go. I would have preferred this had it not been a horror movie, but instead a traditional teen flick. It would have been derivative as heck, but at least the better portion of this film would have been front and center. It's kind of fun to watch King awkwardly navigate high school with familiar tropes. She and the rest of the cast almost make this worth watching. Of course I may be a little biased. Ever since she scared the crap out of me in The Conjuring by telling me about the man behind the door I became something of a Joey King fan boy. I don't really think you can deny that the girl can act though. The movie may be mediocre, but she's just as fantastic as ever.

Interesting considering the times in which we live where people are no longer impressed by anything, we see movies like this that are announced as horror but now it turns out that we must neglect the scares because they're nonexistent and now we must focus on how stupid the characters are and the dumb way in which the plot advances. Pointless.

Lacking any originality or purpose, Wish Upon is largely just a waste of time. The characters are stock, the direction flat, and the "scares" (if you can call them that) are incredibly weak. At least the actors are trying, which helps make the film somewhat watchable. However, a poorly written script is the most at fault here. The dialogue, most of which feels forced and out of place, doesn't make sense half the time, and the pacing is grueling. All in all, avoid Wish Upon - at all costs.