“Irish Wish,” Lindsay Lohan’s latest romantic comedy for Netflix, is a four-leaf clunker.
movie review
IRISH WISH
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated: G. On Netflix.
While the film is a modicum better than the actress’ “Falling For Christmas” last year — such a punishing world, this is — the improvement is also a knock against it.
This high-fructose-corn-syrup movie remains air-headed, that’s for sure, but it’s far less campy and therefore a drag.
Because the rom-com genre loves nothing move than a stressed-out New York woman in publishing, Lohan plays a Manhattan book editor named Maddie.
The first time we meet the perpetually frazzled professional, she slams her scarf in a taxi cab door and it drives away.
Maddie is madly in love with her author Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), a full-of-himself mediocrity who she extensively rewrites while he takes all the credit.
But, at the launch of his new novel “Two Irish Hearts,” Paul instead gets the hots for Maddie’s friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan) and soon proposes to her. Then we’re off to the Emerald Isle for the wedding.
Because production of director Janeen Damian’s film actually took place in that country, and some early overhead shots showed a lovely quaint village, I hoped the movie would offer an authentic vision of rural Ireland.
Nope. When Maddie arrives at the sprawling “The Kennedy House,” it’s pretty much the mansion from “Traitors.”
The same is true of the scenes in nature. Whenever the characters venture outdoors, the sky is made to look so strenuously blue and the grass such a plutonium green, we expect Tinky Winky and the Teletubbies to enter any moment.
But instead pops out magical Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who instructs Maddie to plop down on a stone chair and say what she most desires.
Brigid, the matron saint of Ireland, is known in legends for feeding the hungry and healing the sick. Here, she’s the genie from “Aladdin” and is costumed for a summer stock production of “Brigadoon.”
Maddie wishes, of course, to live out her days with Paul. And, indeed, the next morning she awakens in the man’s bedroom as his bride-to-be.
This is where the film starts to wilt like boiled cabbage. As is typical of “make a wish” stories, the grass proves greener (so flippin’ green) on the other side.
Maddie realizes she and Paul are not meant to be together after all and develops feelings for a somewhat cranky English photographer she met at the airport who’s not named Mr. Darcy but rather James (Ed Speleers, completing the assignment).
Her mom, by the way, is a Des Moines, Iowa, school principal named Rosemary who’s randomly played by Jane Seymour. In Rosemary’s entrance scene, she can’t figure out how to buy toilet paper online. That’s the level of wit we’re working with.
The second half of “Irish Wish,” rated G for Generic, lumbers along until its predictable conclusion.
Lohan is her usually charming self throughout, wasted once again in a cardboard streaming project. This “Wish” is a wash.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
