Wish Upon
(2017) 90 Min.
Rated: PG-13
Country: USA
Director: John R. Leonetti
Starring: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
A teen girl is given a box that grants seven wishes with severe consequences.
Synopsis:
The film opens as Johanna Shannon throws away a wrapped item into the trash can outside. Her young daughter Clare and dog, Max, go for a short bike ride. Clare goes upstairs into the attic to watch as her mother hangs herself.
Years later, Clare (King) is a 17-year-old girl who is still haunted by this. Her father, Jonathan (Phillippe), is a dumpster diver and finds a strange old music box and gives it to Clare as a birthday gift.
Clare is taking chinese and deciphers the box’s writing to mean “Seven Wishes”. Clare wishes that her bully Darcie Chapman would “Go rot”. The next day Darcie wakes up to find she has necrotizing fasciitis and has to go to the ICU. Clare’s dog, Max, ends up going under the house and Clare finds him there dead.
Later Clare wishes that her crush Paul would fall madly in love with her. As a result of this wish, her wealthy uncle August dies by slipping in a bathtub. After learning of his death, Clare wishes that Uncle August left everything to her.
Clare moves into the large house and goes on a shopping spree with her two best friends June and Meredith.
As a result of her previous wish, however, Clare’s old friend and neighbor Mrs. Deluca gets her long braid pulled into a garbage disposal unit and her neck snapped.
Clare is trying to decipher the writing on the box and a classmate Ryan Hui (Ki Hong Lee) offers the services of his cousin named Gina. Gina tells Clare that the box is a version of the Chinese wish pot. She tells her about the previous owner named Lu Mei who used a Chinese demon (a Yaoguai). After Clare leaves Gina’s house she finds her father dumpster diving again despite their new wealth.
Clare wishes that her father would stop being embarrassing. Gina finds more information and tries to contact Ryan. Meanwhile as the result of Clare’s wish her father starts to play the sax again and Gina trips and impales herself on the horn of a statue in her house.
The next day Ryan finds his cousin dead. He tries to ask Clare if she’s used the box or if she’s heard the music play, but she avoids answering him. He tells her the translation from the box is “When the music ends a blood price is paid.”
After realizing she is still bullied despite being rich and having Paul cling to her, Clare wishes she was the most popular girl in school. She slowly loses her best friends because of the constant attention she now has. She tries to talk to June and Meredith about the wish box. Meredith advises her to throw it away.
While Clare is at a school scavenger hunt she finds that Paul has been taking tons of private photos of her without her knowing. Clare breaks up with him. June, Meredith and Clare go on the scavenger hunt and Meredith takes an elevator up in a hotel to hunt a ghost in her phone game. Whens he returns down, a cable snaps and she dies when the elevator collapses.
Ryan reveals to Clare a sordid history of the box and explains that after the seven wishes the yaoguai will claim the soul as its final price. Ryan asks how many wishes she’s made and Clare admits to five. Ryan is rightfully angry with her and Clare keeps justifying her selfish wishes as her not knowing the consequences. Ryan and Clare try to destroy the box but it doesn’t burn or break. That night Paul sneaks into Clare’s room and commits suicide.
The next day the box is gone from its usual hiding spot. All of her wishes become undone. They lose their mansion and Clare becomes bullied again. Clare finds that Meredith has the wish box hidden in her locker and has an argument with her. Clare steals the box and becomes obsessive with it.
She takes the box home and wishes her mother never committed suicide. Her mother and two sisters appear in her house and they celebrate her birthday. Clare looks through her mom’s old paintings and discovers that her mother painted the wish box before and that is why she committed suicide.
Clare hears the music box playing its tune and sees her dad outside holding a ladder for his friend Carl who is cutting branches with a chainsaw. When Jonathan hears Clare’s voice he turns to her and takes his foot off the ladder, causing Carl to lose balance and swing the chainsaw at Jon’s head, killing him in front of Clare.
Clare wishes to go back to the morning her father found the box. Clare wakes up and Max is alive. She calls Meredith to check that she is alive. Clare travels with her dad and finds the box before he does. She takes it to school and talks to Ryan, asking him to bury the box without opening it and promising him a date together.
Clare kisses Ryan, but as she walks away she gets hit by a car and thrown onto another vehicle, killing her.
In a mid-credit sequence Ryan pulls out the box and reads “Seven Wishes” aloud and looks around as though a sequel will materialize itself.
Review:
Is it ever easy to make a film out of W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw? I’m sure there have been better done versions at least. This version, however, is plagued by a detestable whiny protagonist who spends most of the movie horrified by the wrath caused by her own wishes, yet unmotivated to STOP WISHING.
It suffers from a script written by an older person who thinks teens act and talk in a very specific way. Teens totally call each other “smegma” and “Mcfarts” and chase after virtual monsters in their cellphone app on a VERY specific floor of a hotel.
Aside from a bad script and some very strange editing, the acting was pretty standard. No one was standout bad. There were some cool people cast in this, like Shannon Purser as June and Sherilyn Fenn as Mrs. Deluca. I mean Clare was horrible and never really reacted normally, but I feel that was more of a character flaw than one the actress chose.
Sadly, I feel like Wishmaster is a better film. Though this film is full of unintentionally hilarious things, so it is a recommend on that basis alone. Many of the deaths are just pathetic accidents. I’m guessing this film would be genuinely scary to a tween somewhere?