Kimber Myers
St. Patrick’s Day is for drinking, or alternatively, staying inside your home to avoid the people that think St. Patrick’s Day is for drinking. So it makes sense that Netflix would try to capitalize on that latter option by releasing an Irish-themed romantic fantasy for those avoiding drinking themselves into oblivion. While I’m clearly not advocating for the former way of celebrating the holiday, you’d certainly have a better time and lose fewer brain cells than you would watching the absolutely idiotic Irish Wish.
We open by sharing the definition of the word “wish,” in case the audience doesn’t know what this four-letter, one-syllable word means. However, it doesn’t feel the need to explicate the “Irish” bit of the title, giving the lovely country more attention than its plot or any of its characters. Irish Wish was shot entirely in Ireland, including the early scenes that are clearly Dublin standing in for New York City. There’s more care devoted to the landscape shots of the Emerald Isle’s green hills and glassy lakes than in any featuring the actors, even though one of those actors is Lindsey Lohan.
Reuniting with director Janeen Damian after the 2022 Netflix holiday amnesia romance Falling for Christmas, she gives a far better performance than the movie deserves as Maddie, a New York City book editor inexplicably — and secretly — in love with her Irish author Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos). His only merit appears to be his accent, though the actor is Welsh (and the accent is … fine). Maddie is a romance movie protagonist, so of course she is super clumsy and so selfless that she is going to attend the wedding in Ireland of her best friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan) to the man she loves without telling anyone how she feels. However, she does express her feelings aloud while sitting alone on a wishing chair, sharing that she wants to be the one marrying Paul. She wakes up in an alternate reality where she’s the bride, not her friend Emma. Unsurprisingly, marrying Paul isn’t quite everything she’d hoped it would be, especially when she meets James (Ed Speleers), a rakish British photographer who seems to get her far more than her would-be fiancé does.
There’s so much about Irish Wish that makes so little sense. None of the characters appear to be dressed for the same season at the same time, and the trio of 30-something BFFs — Lohan’s Maddie, Tan’s Emma, and Ayesha Curry’s Heather — don’t dress like any young New Yorkers would this decade. Paul is first seen doing a book reading, where he appears to be … reading the entire book, which seems like it might take a while. At that book party, Maddie has a speaker phone conversation with her mother (Jane Seymour) about her secret love for the man of the hour, where anyone who knows him could hear. We get repeated location cards for scenes set in Des Moines, Iowa, but not any of the other places. (Though, to be fair, fake Des Moines is slightly less identifiable than fake New York City or real Ireland.)
Yet the biggest problem is that these types of Hallmark-style movies should at least have something resembling a romance, and there’s so little feeling in Irish Wish. I’ve cared more about (and cried more during) actual greeting card commercials than anything in this film. Lohan and Speleers have good, if entirely chaste, chemistry, but their interactions aren’t enough to convince me of their budding relationship. Their romance and the movie both feel rushed, but even at about 90 minutes long, Irish Wish still isn’t over soon enough. How I longed for a wishing chair and an alternate reality where I didn’t sit through this film.
D
“Irish Wish” is now streaming on Netflix.
