What’s there to be said about the romantic comedy genre that hasn’t already been said? At what point on this conveyor belt of obtusely harmless, ontologically average features are we entertainment writers getting a respite from our role as the mediocrity dial tone for a genre that might as well be in on the whole thing by now?
Irish Wish, Netflix’s latest foray into the genre (whose title I challenge you to say three times fast) has no interest in providing any insight into the musings above. Instead, the film parades forward – rom-com checklist in hand – with the sort of reckless abandon you may find in someone leaving the house on two, maybe three hours of sleep, without breakfast and perhaps missing a sock; there’s a haze in your head, you’re probably unremarkable to the rest of the world, but by golly, you’re gonna get to the proverbial finish line if it kills you.
The movie stars Lindsay Lohan as book editor Maddie, who has a longtime crush on one of her clients, Irish author Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos). After Maddie repeatedly chickens out of expressing her feelings, Paul gets engaged to her best friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan). Heartbroken, insofar as she can be truly heartbroken, Maddie flies to Ireland for Paul and Emma’s wedding when she encounters Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who grants Maddie’s wish of being the one engaged to Paul, magically altering reality to make it happen. Obviously, things don’t exactly go as planned, especially when the young, handsome photographer James (Ed Speleers) gets involved in the wedding, and specifically with Maddie.
The cinematography of Irish Wish is genuinely beautiful, even if cinematographer Graham Robbins is sort of cheating by getting to work with the lush, almost mythological landscapes of Ireland. Nevertheless, Robbins takes full advantage of every opportunity to show off the country’s natural beauty, be it the Cliffs of Moher or even just some nameless landscape that soaks up the ecological genetics of the Emerald Isle. Indeed, Irish Wish‘s greatest strength just might be in convincing viewers to visit the country when they get the chance, and for all we know, that was exactly the goal it had in mind from the get-go.
I say that because the rest of the movie is exactly the sort of vanilla, empty-calorie cheesefest that we, rightly or wrongly, expect from romantic comedies in the age of streaming, where relatively low-effort projects can just be dumped onto watchlist queues to reap easy viewing figures, courtesy of the insincere viewing habits that the current model enables.
However, what I’ve come to observe about this particular circle within this particular genre is that it occupies a certain meta creative space not dissimilar to the “elevated stupidity” approach of action films like The Beekeeper or the Fast & Furious franchise. The difference is that, where the latter commits to its verbose nonsense with such hard-eyed seriousness that it entertainingly masquerades as explosive irony, rom-coms tend to approach their excruciatingly safe material with a certain doe-eyed innocence that, when put together, results in films that just aren’t kinetic enough to reach those same ironic heights in their own way (assuming, of course, they’re even trying to do that at all).
That’s not to say that the storytelling intent behind Irish Wish – namely, learning how to live for yourself and forge your destiny – is anything to sneeze at, but the execution of it all is about as poor as it gets. Maddie is someone we’re barely able to cheer for on almost any level; at no point do we ever get a sense of who she is, which begs the question of just how sincerely she’s capable of wanting anything at all, and when she does want something (in this case, Paul or James), it only ever compounds the story problems due to Paul being a pretty insufferable and controlling person—you cannot fathom why anyone would be into him, which makes his eventual, happy-framed marriage to Emma feel all the more irksome. Meanwhile, James is effectively touted as someone who can “fix” Maddie and allow her to finally be happy, which goes against Irish Wish‘s proclamations of figuring yourself out.
And yet, there’s the subtlest twinkle of a wink throughout the movie that’s hard to ignore, and you can’t help but feel that, on some level, Irish Wish truly is operating on a certain degree of self-awareness that may not work entirely, but is present enough to stir up a knowing smirk or nine from its viewers.
What do I mean by that? I mean that, if any person who doesn’t go about their day on autopilot was present for the events that take place within this movie, they would be smack-dab in the middle of an ungodly hell. Indeed, there’s very little on this Earth that’s harder to watch than droves of unremarkable people try desperately to have a good time, using their plastic smiles and aimless pseudo-enthusiasm as a stopgap for not understanding what they themselves consider a good time, and so subsequently default to the things that were sold to them as good times.
In witnessing that, then, one may come to realize that navigating the rom-com trench is its own form of self-inflicted hell, as this content is what the public wished for by hitting play on all the direly uncreative rom-coms that came before Irish Wish. Like Maddie, we might just be paying the price for that wish all without having learned a single lesson.
In summary, Irish Wish is a silly and stupid movie in a genre that’s garnered a reputation for being silly and stupid, and it seems to be entirely okay with sliding into Netflix’s ever-growing pile of rom-com slush. But, as it smiles and waves to the rest of the genre like a good little rom-com, you may catch a hint of a gleam in its eye and wonder, very briefly; is that who Irish Wish really is? Or did director Janeen Damian and screenwriter Kirsten Hansen just pull off one of the most maliciously untheatrical, galaxy-brain plays of the year?
But hey, maybe it’s just a silly and stupid movie.
