It’s no secret that the current streaming model has enabled an influx of cinematic drivel in a big way; for every top-notch Netflix original like May December, there’s a Me Time, Heart of Stone, and a Rebel Moon to reel the library back a few steps.
Among the most notorious pieces of the model’s bad movie ammunition, however, are those that can be found in the romantic comedy genre. Indeed, it may be somewhat reductive to say that rom-coms have only exponentially continued to establish themselves as the plain white bread of movies, but it’s becoming less and less reductive as the years go by.
Enter Irish Wish, the latest high-profile Netflix rom-com to hit streaming, which continues to sit comfortably atop the movie charts since it dropped on March 15, per FlixPatrol. Indeed, offensively inoffensive movies have scored yet another victory off the back of our own failings.
Because here’s the thing about Irish Wish: There’s a wildly foreboding sense that the film is in on the rom-com joke in a way that only the genre’s doe-eyed impression of effort could be. As our hero Maddie navigates the soullessly picturesque plasticity of a tragically inharmonious wedding that she quite foolishly wished for—complete with the ever-impossible choice between her dream guy and her other dream guy (one of whom is a complete narcissist, of course)—the film actually seems to genuinely sell how fresh of a hell this situation would be for anyone, and you may then consciously grasp that a world that enables rom-coms like Irish Wish is, in turn, hell in its own right.
Irish Wish, then, was itself a wish of our own collective making. Had enough of us decided to stop defaulting to “Let’s just watch something stupid” in time, we may have seen a world where the rom-com machine’s gears began to rust by now. But no, we keep shoveling our Netflix hours into bad movies, and the thoroughly vanilla Irish Wish is our latest goalpost because of that; nice work, team.
(featured image: Netflix)
