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Lindsay Lohan’s career rehab continues with Irish Wish, her second holiday-themed rom-com for Netflix. The first was 2022’s Falling for Christmas, a sizable hit that proved the beloved star of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls hasn’t lost her appeal. Well, Irish Wish (which, like Falling for Christmas, is directed by Janeen Damian) is only sort of a holiday movie, not being about St. Patrick’s Day per se, but it’s set primarily on the Emerald Isle, and being released during Green Beer Season. Lohan’s last leading role prior to her resurgence was Paul Schrader’s notorious 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, which felt like a low point for all involved parties; Lohan subsequently fell further off the radar before re-emerging for these easygoing Netflix rom-coms, which, regardless of their artistic verisimilitude (or lack thereof), seem like the perfect reminder of why everyone loved her in the 2000s.
IRISH WISH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Maddie Kelly (Lohan) is in looooooove, and it sucks, I guess. It’s her own damn fault, because she just can’t find the courage to share her feelings with her crush. Why? Dunno. But we can maybe surmise that it’s either because A) she’s as timid as, uh, um, (quick Googles “most timid animals”) an aardvark, B) it’d compromise her professional standing because her crush is a famous novelist and she’s his editor, or C) because the movie needs a plot. We meet Maddie at the gala for Paul Kennedy’s (Alexander Vlahos) new book, and from the looks and smell of things, he seems to be a Nicholas Sparksian writer of schmaltz ‘n’ slop – and he’s not quite willing to give Maddie the credit she deserves for her work. It seems she wrote most of the novel herself, and it also seems like she doesn’t care too terribly much about being underappreciated, since she’d rather Paul appreciate her in entirely different ways, e.g., those involving kissing and the sharing of feelings and/or bodily juices.
Now, Maddie has shared this with nobody except her mother (Jane Seymour, in a role that’s totally a waste of Jane Seymour) back in Iowa, whose advice is like, hey, shit or get off the pot, lady. Maddie has two besties, Emma (Elizabeth Tan) and Heather (Ayesha Curry), who do what the two besties in rom-coms always do: Show up at the gala to support their girl, and not know that Maddie’s in love with Paul, since Emma makes eyes at the guy and then the next scene occurs six months later with Maddie in the airport saying “I can’t believe they’re getting married” prior to flying to Ireland for the wedding. Life comes at you fast, especially when it’s edited like a movie and can just skip ahead six months like that.
And so Maddie ends up at the estate belonging to Paul’s family, who, from the looks of things, are royalty or czars or oligarchs or something, since the place makes Saltburn look like the Worst Toilet in Scotland. I didn’t mention that Maddie is an adorable klutz, which comes into play when she meets James (Ed Speleers) at the luggage returns and ends up helping him spill the contents of his suitcase all over the floor. They banter, because they’re rom-com characters, and end up not liking each other, because they’re rom-com characters, and will almost certainly end up smooching before the end of the movie, because they’re rom-com characters. Want to hazard a guess as to why James ends up being the wedding photographer? Right: Because even though Paul’s family has organized a wedding event to rival an emperor’s coronation, they failed to hire one. And you thought I was going to say “because he’s a rom-com character,” although I kinda said it without coming out and saying it saying it.
Despite the obvious foreshadowing of pending rom-com inevitabilities, Maddie mopes around the succulent Irish countryside, heartbroken like a (quick Googles “most heartbroken animals”) sea cucumber. There she sits on a rock and meets a fairy godmother leprechaun woman known as Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who grants her a wish, and so Maddie wishes that she were marrying Paul instead of Emma, and poof! She awakens in an alternate reality where the wedding dress is for her and Paul is showering in her shower, except she’s still a megaklutz who can barely keep a bicycle upright. Now wait a second – is this another damn multiverse movie? Ugh, I say, ugh. Then again, it might just be one of those careful-what-you-wish-for movies set in a reality where magic is real. Or am I just splitting hairs here?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lohan knows her way around a magical premise, since The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday gave her a nice Hollywood career for a while. If memory serves, 27 Dresses had some similar plot contrivances, so cross that Heigl dud with Cinderella I guess, and, um, The Banshees of Inisherin since that had some nice Irish-countryside cinematography too.
Performance Worth Watching: We need to talk about Lohan, because she still very much possesses the It that made her star 20 years ago. Now she just needs someone to give her a screenplay that makes the most of that It, instead of weak-tea rom-coms like this.
Memorable Dialogue: James delivers the line to Maddie that should’ve got the screenwriter fired: “It’s one thing to edit a book, but you really shouldn’t go on editing your own life.”
Sex and Skin: None. This thing is squeaky-clean.
Our Take: Lohan deserves better. Falling for Christmas is no masterpiece, but it at least gave her more to do than Irish Wish, which consists wholly of baseline rom-com cliches. The story is dull and predictable, and the characters would be blown away by flea farts, and never stand a chance against a blustery Irish gale.
Now, nobody wants a Charlie Kaufmanesque surrealist pondering on existential quandaries from a throwaway rom-com diversion, but Irish Wish doesn’t show the slightest interest in the metaphysical implications of this plot, which finds Lohan’s character in a dead-literal imposter-syndrome situation. Even a hint of the psychological fallout of the implied timeline-hopping might’ve given this movie a fringe of interest, and I know I should be reviewing the movie that is instead of the one it could’ve been. And the movie that is is one chock-full of DOA wedding-cake jokes, cutesy moments down the poob (what’s a movie set in Ireland without scenes that take place down the poob?) and strained slapstick bits to work through here – or combinations thereof, of course.
There’s one scene in which Maddie and James sit atop a gorgeous Irish cliff overlooking the sea, and she reveals that she’s a fan of James Joyce, like super huge, a total Swiftie for Finnegans Wake, and that’s not only a missed opportunity to indulge some thematic parallels to Ulysses, but also the only hint that these characters are anything but cogs in a disappointingly predictable plot. My impulse is to be kind to Irish Wish, since it may be a bit of functional escapism for fans of this type of innocuous silliness. So instead of calling it charmless and witless, I’ll say it lacks charm and wit, because it sounds nicer. But that doesn’t mean I think the movie is good, because it isn’t. I’m rooting for the Lohanaissance, and even though Irish Wish won’t scuttle the relaunch, it doesn’t even get close to the most out of its star.
Our Call: Blarney. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
