For Claire Shannon (Joey King), High School is a real struggle since she's always being harassed by the popular kids at school and is a total social washout save for her two buddies Meredith (Syndey Park) and June (Shannon Purser).It doesn't help that her dad (Ryan Phillipe) dives into dumpsters for a living (he sells any trinkets he finds), an occupation she finds to be embarrassing. However, her dad hands her an object he finds in the trash in one his dives, some kind of box with ancient Mandarin writing on it that grants whoever finds it seven wishes. Claire believes it's all hokum until her wish for her school bully "to go rot" comes true.
Now, Claire is using her newfound box to make her own life better, including getting herself and her father a much better place to live, getting a guy she's got a crush on to fall madly in love with her (why oh why isn't Rick Sanchez around to tell her that's a bad idea?) and all sorts of other personal goals. But there's a catch she's unaware of; every wish you make will result in someone the wish-maker knows dying in an unrelated accident. Now the body count (including one poor doggie) is just piling on up as Claire continues to use this magic wish box and it must be asked...can Claire stop making wishes or is everyone around her doomed to die?
There's a bunch of wishes factoring heavily into the plot of Wish Upon but couldn't one of the characters wished for a more compelling premise for them to all inhabit? Or at least some good scares to punctuate the premise? I'm a total scaredy-cat, a wimp in the first degree and even I didn't find myself even once being put on edge by the various scares in Wish Upon, even the jump scares failed to get a reaction out of me. The death scenes lack imagination on a conceptual level and, in the rare times we even get to see them occur, they're clunkily filmed so that the film can achieve a PG-13 rating. Those (understandably) coming to this just looking for some cool grisly deaths, look elsewhere, Wish Upon is limp in that department and anywhere else when it comes to creating scares.
Somehow, the movie fares even worse at sustaining its plot for an entire 90-minute runtime (and that's including credits!), especially in the third act once Claire realizes her wishes are killing people and the movie paints her as some kind of addict who can't stop wishing for things. Why should I care about this person and what happens to her? The writers don't seem to care since this bizarre character turn accomplishes getting the feature to extend its running time, which is how all good characterization choices are dictated. Honestly, the lack of a likeable or cohesive lead character wouldn't be much of a problem if the scares were coming at a steady pace, but like I said, they're not, at all.
The acting is forgettable, with talented young actors like Joey King, Sydney Park and Ki Hong Lee (we need to get Lee something really good to act in, by the way) getting wasted on thinly-sketched teen girl stereotypes and Ryan Phillipe just looking zoned out as the protagonist's father. The direction from director John R. Leonetti is even worse and the only other thing worth remarking on in this turgid mess is how cring-inducingly hard Barbara Marshall's script tries to be "hip" to young audiences. An obvious stand-in for Instagram pops up a lot, the character Meredith is obsessed with a Pokemon Go! knock-off while all sorts of gratingly "hip" dialogue is always exchanged by the teenage characters. Instead of channeling the authentic verbiage of modern day youths, Wish Upon comes across like the cinematic equivalent of Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock trying to go undercover as a High Schooler and then act all "hip" to the teens there. "How do you do fellow kids" indeed, that's the level of accuracy in regards to how actual teens act that Wish Upon has.
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