A happier father, a blighted bully, a fortuitous windfall-that sort of thing.

These embarrassments (and enough high school Mandarin to read a few characters on this ancient box) drive Clare to use the box to wish. The 2015 Black List script tries to be too cute with its youthful references and dates itself as laughably as a reference to fidget spinners will date this review. This is almost as embarrassing for Clare as the dialogue is for us, as its once-probably-cutting-edge script falls to the ultimate teen slang killer: time. It’s never made clear if her dad scraps these items for a living, dives for a hobby or operates in some gray area in between-the only thing we know for sure is that he does all this in the company of his friend Carl (Kevin Hanchard, in one of the most pointless roles I’ve ever seen in a film) and in plain view of his daughter Clare’s school, sometimes directly across the street.

The problems all begin when Clare’s dumpster-diving father (Ryan Phillippe) finds a magical music box covered in ancient Chinese inscriptions. These are not evolutions, as the movie desires them to be, but moody skips and hiccups so violent that they threaten to shake the film apart. She cannot surmount Wish Upon’s strange mish-mash of high school dramedy and kill-happy horror camp, one second asked to channel Lord of the Rings-like obsession, whimpering vulnerability the next and cocky high school cool soon after. Star Joey King broke out as one of the Conjuring daughters plagued by the supernatural and now leads this, a film whose tonal inconsistencies plague her performance as Clare. The similarities between horror films aren’t limited to their creative talent. Wish Upon may be the film to finally snuff that out. Leonetti directed Annabelle to great financial success, so he has been tapped for another horror boasting some tangential connection to the goodwill still emanating from the haunted history of The Conjuring. The Conjuring’s critical and commercial success established a cinematic universe unto itself, with spin-offs like the inferior Annabelle, focused on the haunted doll that served as the opening paranormal example in the original film. Wish Upon is a stale, off-brand soda of a movie: It has all the active ingredients of one of the best horror movies of the decade, The Conjuring, yet it’s more apt to be the butt of a joke than a satisfactory replacement.

Wish upon the movie fanfiction