Wish Upon ** (2017, Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee) – Movie Review

Joey King stars as motherless teenager Clare Shannon, whose dad likes to earn a living digging around for treasure in the trash he finds in dumpsters. One day, they discover a cute Chinese box that turns out to have magic powers and can grant the girl seven wishes. That’s good. But next comes the bad.

Fascinated and addicted, she soon uses her wishes for her own stuff. But she discovers that every wish is accompanied by a gruesome death and that an evil entity lives inside the box and is probably behind the sequence of deaths of her dog, nice neighbour, friends and family.

Poor Ryan Phillippe is relegated to the dad role, and he is not well cast, or very good either. But then the script doesn’t give him much of chance. Unfortunately for Phillippe, his soft role requires him regularly to play soft jazz in the sunlight, making him look an idiot and laughing stock. This move to playing cute dads in cheesy horror movies looks desperate and isn’t a good career move for the talented and still-in-the-game actor. However, to be fair, the film would be worse without him.

Director John R Leonetti’s routine, though watchable 2017 teen gore fest chiller runs along very familiar lines recalling other much better thrillers, Final Destination and Gremlins for starters. It is not very good but, then again, it is not very bad either. However, it is not at all scary or even eerie, just a cheesy horror movie, good for a grin and a scoff.

King, a veteran at 27, is fine, just like she was in The Conjuring. The Chinese box itself, like the film, is dull looking and very low-tech. It does actually look like it came out of a trash can.

It is written by Barbara Marshall, who earned a BA in theatre and dance and a BS in radio-TV-film from the University of Texas at Austin.

Veteran cinematographer Leonetti also directed Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, The Butterfly Effect 2 and Annabelle (2014).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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