Film Review - Wish (2023)

Wish is the newest Disney Animation film and stars Ariana DeBose as Asha a young girl who lives in the kingdom of Rosas which is ruled by King Magnifico (Chris Pine) but one day a wishing ceremony is held and Asha hopes her 100 year old grandfather will have his wish granted but when that doesn’t happen Asha decides to get rid of the King and free his wish.

Wish is a near complete total disaster of a film and the more I have thought about it the more I come to loathe it.

Firstly, the whole wish thing doesn’t really make a lot of sense and more often than not feels like the wishing stone from Wonder Woman 1984 where it felt like any wish could be granted with no real rules attached to the stone, here any wish can be made to the King and more or less be granted if the moment is right and when you think of the Genie of the Lamp or the Dragon Balls which also grant wishes they have actual rules attached.

The Lamp has 3 main provisos: The Genie can’t kill anyone, can’t make anybody fall in love with anybody else and can’t bring people back from the dead while the Dragon Balls can’t revive someone who has either already died twice or died from a natural cause ie Cancer and Kami had to expunge the evil within him so he could become the guardian of the Earth and then create the Dragon Balls.

Secondly the characters here are deathly dull, I love Ariana DeBose but more often than not she tries to do the same cute and quirky comedic performance that Kristen Bell did as Anna in the Frozen films and it worked there because Bell came from a comedic background for the most part whereas here DeBose who was so swoon worthy and charismatic in West Side Story just feels like a flopping fish with all her spritzing comic lines that fall flat and leave blood on the footpath, as for Chris Pine he does what little he can but the turn from good to bad really doesn’t work and he can’t make it work.

As for the sidekick characters, the talking goat gets very annoying very quickly as it more or less spouts the same ponderous and insufferable piffle that half the cast exposited over and over and over again in A Wrinkle in Time while the little star creature is okay but doesn’t really standout like say Abu did in Aladdin.

Which leads me to my third point and that is the storytelling which is a complete mess to sit through at only 95 smegging minutes, while your sitting there watching it you feel like your watching an AI generation of the rough treatment for the film that would be shown before smart studio executives like Jeffrey Katzenberg from the Renaissance era would look at it and go “this is a mess, redo this” (and Jeffrey did just that on Aladdin by the way) and that treatment jumps from one storyline to another and one character moment to another in such a haphazard way that none of it feels organic or thought through properly.

Okay say you have Magnifico as the villain well why not have him be bad like Maleficent or Jafar or Hades were right from the get-go and establish his goal to become all powerful and rule the kingdom, Asha could be the young heroine like Belle or Ariel who wants more out of life be it the stuff that is neat and makes her collection complete or wants adventure in the great wide somewhere but instead we get what we get and the film suffers as a result.

And lastly the music here feels too taped on and not organically connected to the main body of the film like the songs of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken did in Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin (which Sir Tim Rice was determined to do when he worked with Alan after Howard passed away) and again they feel like an AI generation of early demos before they would be worked on some more and they just come into the film and then go again.

And so that was Wish and it is easily one of my Turkeys of the year and I have felt this for a while now but now feel it in my bones that Disney desperately needs another Jeffrey Katzenberg to take the helm and succeed Bob Iger for while Jeffrey had his faults (insisting When Love is Gone be cut from the Muppets Christmas Carol was a colossal error) he wasn’t afraid to ruffle the feather, make his talent fight for and defend their ideas and crack the whip when needed, perhaps then Disney can get out of this rut their in and get back to giving us great films again but perhaps the old saying of the bigger you are the harder you fall has never felt as true as it does with Disney right now, 1 out of 5.