If I've learned anything this year, it's that month-long movie challenges are difficult to complete when you find yourself bedbound for a week right in the middle of them. Also, if you then decide to commit to writing 50,000 words of a "novel" during the month of November at the last minute because of a TV show you discovered while stuck in bed, you should be aware that your productivity for everything else during that month is going to take a serious nose-dive. But enough about where I've been - let's review Wish Upon.
Clare Shannon is your typical high school student outcast - she's a talented artist, she's way too nice and she's one of the school's 'poor' kids. Her father collects junk and scrap metal for a living, often dumpster diving next to her school, which only humiliates Clare even more. Things start to change, however, when her father gives her a strange box he found on an abandoned estate as an early birthday present. The box is similar to a Chinese Wishing Pot, but different - the writings on the box say that, by placing your hands on the box while making your wish, you can have anything you want... for a price. At first, Clare doesn't believe any of this, but after the school bully contracts necrotising fasciitis, her crush asks her out and she inherits a mansion and accompanying fortune, she starts to believe in the box's power. But with each wish, the 'price' grows... Will Clare be able to resist the temptations of the box and find a way to undo what she has already caused?
Wish Upon would probably have passed completely under my radar if I hadn't read an article about it several months back. In the article, one of the filmmakers said that Clare, our protagonists, wasn't necessarily a 'good' character because at one point she wishes harm on her school bully. I guess that puts me somewhere on the level of Lucretia Borgia then because I've got a whole list of people I regularly wish anal boils upon. Seriously, allowing us to see a character's dark side developing throughout the course of a movie is perfectly fine, but trying to tell us how to feel about characters before we've even seen the film (and when nearly everyone would sympathise with the point you're trying to claim is 'bad)', is not a good start to things.
Clearly, Wish Upon is another retelling of that old cautionary tale, The Monkey's Paw - aka "Be careful what you wish for." To those knowledgeable in horror films, it's also a rather awkward mismatch of Wishmaster and Final Destination, with maybe a bit of The Craft shoehorned in for good measure (because when Clare wishes for her hunky crush to "fall madly in love with [her]", I know all I could think of was how well that turned out for Neve Campbell's character). To add to all that, it's also a PG-13 horror film, which means that pretty much all of its Final-Destination-esque death setpieces are virtually bloodless or cut away from so fast that they might as well have been. And I've never enjoyed being blueballed by horror films.
The biggest issue I have with Wish Upon, however, is its ending. Here be spoilers, so highlight and read the rest of this paragraph at your own risk... At the end of the film, Clare thinks she's come up with a way to beat the evil wish box by wishing that the crane operator hadn't been drinking on the day they got the shipment in- no, sorry, by wishing to go back in time to before her father finds the evil wish box and gives it to her... and then she wakes up in bed and it's like the whole movie was just a bad dream. "But wait!" the film screams at us as it sees up preparing torches, pitchforks and a list of films where the "It was all just a dream!" trope has ever worked (it begins with The Wizard of Oz and ends with Inception, and there aren't any films between those two), "that's not the actual ending! See how everything's fine now and Clare's so happy with a new-found respect for what she has? Wait for it... BAM! Now she's dead! The end!"
...no, Wish Upon. Two audience-screwing tropes do not cancel each other out and suddenly make the film good somehow. It just makes everyone think that the writer suddenly died mid-sentence, Monty Python-like, or was perhaps kidnapped by angry djinn, and no-one else had any idea how to end the movie so they just went for the cheapest cop-outs they could come up with.
Wish Upon was directed by John R. Leonetti, whose previous directorial credits include Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Annabelle, among others, so perhaps the alarm bells should have started ringing there (although he seems to be a much better cinematographer than a director, so perhaps he just keeps having terrible luck when it comes to the films he gets to direct). In the end, it's a pretty insipid film that probably deserved to have been overlooked, as the alternative has just made me rather aggravated.
(And yes, in case you were wondering I did "win" NaNoWriMo this year.)
