Lindsay Lohan Should’ve Wished for a Better Netflix Movie

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Netflix needs Lindsay Lohan, not the other way around. After Lohan’s highly anticipated, perfectly decent holiday rom-com Falling for Christmas marked her official film comeback in 2022, the power dynamics shifted. Lohan was not just hireable, but she was back onscreen tapping into that effervescent, enigmatic quality that made her a superstar from the jump. And people wanted more.

The public has been champing at the bit and foaming at the mouth for liters of LiLo. The reaction alone to Lohan’s return to the Vanity Fair Oscar party last weekend was enough to confirm that the former tabloid darling is back in a big way. It’s that kind of buzzy excitement that makes Lohan’s latest film with Netflix, Irish Wish, such a disappointment. Where Falling for Christmas felt like an event—one that, granted, had the magical Rudolph-red hue of the holidays working in its favor—Irish Wish plays like a run-of-the-mill streaming romantic comedy that was dropped on its head and is stumbling around, trying to convince everyone that it doesn’t have a concussion.

Christmas movies are expected to have a tolerable level of kitsch. It’s part of their charm. But those low standards don’t apply to other seasonal fare, and certainly not to a love story released in time for St. Patrick’s Day. Irish Wish is bland, woefully flat, and entirely devoid of laughs, and is a vacuum of charisma when its star isn’t in the frame. Netflix might be a safe place for Lohan to get her groove back, but Irish Wish is merely proof that she has much more to offer than what the dearth of streaming can provide her.

In the movie, Lohan plays Maddie, a clumsy book editor with a soft heart and an inability to stick up for herself. We learn that at the top of the film, when Maddie’s scarf is caught in the door of her cab, and the car peels off with it stuck inside—luckily leaving her without a trip to the ER and a critical neck injury. This physical comedy is exactly what Lohan is so adept at and game for, and Irish Wish is packed with these moments. They’re also clever tools to distract from the fact that the movie has next to no plot. It’s like the physical gags came first, and the rest was cobbled together once the cast landed in Ireland.

Blessedly, the film was shot on-location on the Emerald Isle, which at least makes it pleasant to look at (even if the color saturation is dialed way up). Maddie and her friends are in Ireland for the wedding of Maddie’s most successful author, Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), who is not James Kennedy from Vanderpump Rules, though you will likely keep thinking that’s who the characters are referring to. That name mix up isn’t helped by the fact that there’s another wedding guest named James (Ed Speleers), whom Maddie meets at the airport after a contentious showdown over a suitcase at the baggage claim. But regardless of pop culture confusion, the group is just there to have a good time! Well, at least they would be, if only Maddie weren’t in love with Paul and jealous of her friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan) for swiping the author outfrom under her.

It’s this jealousy that Irish Wish uses to craft its strange, mystical central plot. Maddie meets a peculiar woman in a field, who turns out to be the little trickster that is Ireland’s patron saint Brigid (you might’ve heard of Saint Brigid’s friend, Saint Patrick). Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who is written like a Casey Wilson parody character and dressed head to toe in clothes from the Chico’s clearance rack, grants Maddie’s wish to be the one who marries Paul. This, naturally, thrusts Maddie into an alternate universe, where she soon discovers that being in a mutual romance with Paul isn’t all she imagined it to be.

This sort of preposterous comedy is nothing new for Lohan. She cut her teeth on curses in Just My Luck and body swapping in Freaky Friday. She alone is the reason why this film has any redeeming qualities. Lohan is the only one capable of delivering dialogue like it’s not being read by a five-year-old who can understand the words but doesn’t quite know how to properly emphasize them in a sentence yet. Speleers and Ayesha Curry, who plays Maddie’s best friend Heather, come close to matching Lohan’s naturalism, but even they are hampered by a downright baffling script.

But it’s not just the dialogue that frustrates. Irish Wish is a genuinely poorly made film, even by Netflix rom-com standards. An early cut from Maddie and Paul’s book party to Maddie and her friends in a car, out on the town, comes with a positively blaring music cue that isn’t mixed into the film at all. It nearly blew my eyebrows off, and watching the “car” move through a green screen background that looked more like the Wachowski sisters’ Speedracer or Rainbow Road in Mario Kart didn’t help that jarring factor either. The editing for every sequence that doesn’t demand some sort of big physical gag is shoddy and inelegant. There’s only so much beauty that can be captured along Ireland’s coast without someone stepping in, and director Janeen Damien’s eye seems to be on the fritz.

Those physical comedy bits are, however, a few small highlights. It’s a joy to watch Lohan thrive in these scenes, where she comes alive and uses all of her star quality. A scene where Maddie accidentally clocks Paul is particularly good because Lohan flips on whatever switch she had turned off to go big, bold, and distinctive, finally making Maddie her own. It sometimes seems as though Lohan is actively choosing restraint, like she’s pulling back to let the actors whose names fall below her on the call sheet shine. That’s a nice gesture, but they rarely, if ever, do. In fact, these people can’t even return the favor to Lohan. At one point, Maddie’s friends ask her to take pictures of them like Maddie is an employee at the zoo. No one forges an ounce of chemistry, and Lohan acts circles around them all with ease.

The laughs-to-silence ratio in Irish Wish is staggering, like peering down at a bowl of Lucky Charms and looking for the marshmallows: There just aren’t enough of them! Lohan is an actor with innate comedic timing, a penchant for slapstick humor, and a deep capacity for emotion. We’re not asking for Lohan’s return to a Nancy Meyers film (although that’s exactly what she deserves). Viewers merely want to watch something that isn’t insipid and horribly made. Perhaps it’s what Lohan is working up to, and if her bright, shining star is any indication, a meatier role is not far away. We know she’s got a handle on romantic comedies again, and Irish Wish might as well be her foray into the horror genre, based on how scarily atrocious it is. Time to see what Lohan can do in a drama.