Netflix released a romance starring Lindsay Lohan called Irish Wish. When the love of her life gets engaged to her best friend, Maddy puts her feelings aside to be a bridesmaid at their wedding in Ireland. Days before the pair are set to marry, Maddy makes him spontaneous wish for true love and finds herself in an alternate reality, where a chance encounter shows her that sometimes you need to be careful who you wish for.
I'll just go straight to the point on this one. The movie's boring and slow and unfortunately lacking in romantic chemistry. Lohan is Maddy, the one secretly in love with this other guy, but her best friend ends up winning his heart.
And even through magical plot conveniences, right before the wedding, Maddy wishes things were different. However, she ends up as the blushing bride. Now, before the wish was made, Maddy has a run-in with an Irish photographer and instantly we can tell that these are the two that are meant to be together.
They click and begin to show good chemistry. Unfortunately, though, all the setups and the interactions, they're rushed along. We get one short sequence where Maddy and James, the guy, get to spend some time together and we witness the start of feelings.
But that's all we get. Every other interaction is cut short, leaving us with an impotent and wanting feeling. And the acting is fine for a low-key romance film.
I mean, I want to call this a rom-com, but I never laughed. If they were going for comedy, that was a miss. I mean, there are some silly setups that lead to slapstick, but again, not funny.
And because we're cheated out of a budding romance thick with tension, there's very little investment to have. I want Maddy and James to become a couple, but even if they do, it's not going to feel earned. And I can totally see what the story was attempting to execute, especially when it would present us with some silly situations that give winks to the audience. Like maybe having Jane Seymour as Maddy's mom keep running into complications as she tries to fly out for the wedding.
And it's obvious that there's a reason why she can't get to the ceremony on time. But the story and dialogue really believe they're more clever than they actually are. And despite being only 93 minutes, the pacing drags terribly, leading us from one uninteresting scene to another.
I have a pretty low bar when it comes to romances and rom-coms. I mean, it was good to see Lohan diving back into this genre, but the story and the direction just left me bummed and disengaged.
Although, the one massive positive thing I can say about this is we get some spectacular views of Ireland and, most specifically, the Cliffs of Moher. They are stunning, and I loved how vibrant the greens of the landscapes were. I mean, it's almost like they cranked up the saturation on those just to make them especially pop.
Irish Wish was a huge miss. The acting, storyline, chemistry, and relational tension were poorly executed and sometimes not present at all. This type of narrative is expected to be predictable, but when the audience is cheated out of a romantic story in a romance film, there's nothing to engage or hold our interest.
Lohan and the rest of the cast, they felt stiff and not invested in their performances, creating a dull and dragging experience. For that, I'm giving the movie one and a half out of five stars. I felt the movie lacked that element to gain itself enough traction that it needed.
