"Wish Upon" livens up whenever the box extracts its blood price, but only a little.
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Nor is "Wish Upon" willing to crank up the outrageousness and really go for it-a scenario that might've at least secured a spot in the Midnight Movie Hall of Fame. This is also the kind of movie where one of the heroine's friends chastises her late in the story for wasting her seven wishes on popularity and personal riches when she could be using the box to solve world hunger this comment plays like a preemptive strike against criticism, and only serves to remind us that the movie can't or won't explore its central idea in anything but a perfunctory way. The script thinks that if it makes the Asian characters cool, and includes a couple of lines shading Claire for stereotyping Chinese people, it won't seem like it's wallowing in the same cultural cliches that drive older horror and fantasy films. The box exudes The Ominous Mystery of the Far East, and Claire has a crush on a Chinese American classmate named Ryan Hui (Ki Long Hee of " The Maze Runner"), who takes the box to his cousin Gina ( Alice Lee), who translates the characters in exchange for an order of won tons. The story is steeped in Orientalist cliches that are also very '80s. This all matters because originality and specificity would've set the story apart and made it seem special. The conception of all the young characters feels like an older screenwriter's idea of what it means to be young and American at this point in history. The characters speak in outdated '80s and '90s slang ("Bitchin'!" "No way." "Yes, way"), and they are often played by actors who seem too old, or at least too self-possessed, to be teenagers. She's made out to be a pariah, but she has two spirited, funny, attractive friends ( Sydney Park and Shannon Purser, aka Barb on "Stranger Things"), and when she's bullied, she stands up for herself immediately. There's not much internal logic to the way the script sets up Claire. The best thing you can say about it is that the acting is alright, there are a few decently executed moments of nastiness, the whole thing is in focus and you can understand what's being said. But it's tough to discern from the evidence onscreen that anybody could see something remarkable in this material, besides the possibility of making money from people who thought they'd be getting a great or even good horror film, as opposed to one of those here-and-gone time-wasters that I used to watch at the dollar theater when I was a kid. The screenplay made The Black List, an annual film industry survey of the "most liked" unproduced screenplays. Leonetti ("Mortal Kombat: Annihilation") and writer Barbara Marshall saw in this story. That sounds like a decent setup for a schlock horror flick, but it's hard to tell what director John R.
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