By Emilio Frenk.
Director: John R. Leonetti
Cast: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee, Mitchell Slaggert, Shannon Purser, Sydney Park, Elizabeth Röhm, Josephine Langford and Sherilyn Fenn.
Rating: Poor.
John R. Leonetti, director of the 2014 horror hit “Annabelle” brings “Wish Upon”, a horror film that has one of the most stupid premises I´ve seen in a while.
The movie tells the story of Clare Shannon (Joey King) a girl who lost her mom when she was very young and lives with her father Jonathan (Ryan Phillippe) a musician who lost interest on everything after the passing of his wife.
One day Jonathan while he is scavenging in the dumpsters finds an ancient Chinese music box and gives it to his daughter.
Clare is attracted to this box, but she is not aware of the powers of the box. She successfully finds out what is in that box and she has to make seven wishes.
Now every wish that Clare makes has fatal consequences. After she realizes this, Clare know must decide if she wants to continue making the wishes or gets rid of the box for good.
One of the reasons that I mentioned that this movie had one of the most stupid plots is because of the fact that involves a music box that has life and does very bad things.
I had the feeling that this movie was going to be bad and I was not wrong at all. The premise of this film is awful and nothing works.
The screenplay written by Barbara Marshall was empty at all meanings. The story didn´t make sense and I felt that she wanted to make something similar to “John Carpenter´s Christine” where a car is involved.
The thing is that one of the reasons why “Christine” was successful back in the eighties is because of the fact that besides is a movie that was adapted by a Stephen King novel, not only had an interesting premise and plot, but had great characters.
Here the major problem were the characters and I do think that the movie could have had good things if more work would have been involved. For starters doing it with something that is not a music box.
John R. Leonetti´s direction was all over the place and he did the same mistakes as he did with “Annabelle”.
I felt that he wanted to do a very visual film, but he did not achieve that either. At least “Annabelle” was visual but this one it wasn´t and the performances of all the cast were very flat starting with the main lead Joey King.
There were moments that were interesting but the execution and the direction that Leonetti was going didn´t work.
The movie was predictable from beginning to end. And the music in the box every time that it was happening instead of being frightened, I was annoyed by the sound of it.
The whole movie was laughable and yes it has the classical horror moments where a loud sound is involved and sometimes you jump off your seat but that was pretty much it.
I hope this is a big learning lesson from John R. Leonnetti for his poor direction and for Barbara Marshall for her poor screenplay, that looked like an amateur film.
With that being said “Wish Upon” is not only one of the worst movies I had seen in a while but it´s one of the year´s worst movies.