WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES
It could've been worse

  I liked the original Wishmaster more than most people probably did, but I'm not too proud to admit that it's entirely likely that the only reason it got a theatrical release was that it came so soon after the surprise success of Scream.  It was silly, but it was fun.  Wishmaster 2 is mostly just silly, though not without its moments.

That pesky Jinn (Andrew Divoff) is back, conning people into making a wish that he turns into torments.  He's been freed by a clumsy art burglar (Holly Fields) who killed a security guard in her escape, and now he's setting about collecting 1001 souls (he gets one from everybody who makes a wish) so that he can conquer the world.  Add a hunky priest (Paul Johansson) and the Russian mob (!) and we almost have a Broadway musical.

Divoff played the Jinn in the first film, and here, he manages to come across as even goofier.  Oh, he's got a great voice for it, and he'd make a fine voice actor; the problem is his face and impossibly stiff, Al Gore-like posture.  His facial expression stays the same for the whole film, like a man trying to smile through excruciating constipation.  As for his posture, he is ALWAYS looking straight ahead.  He never turns his head, he just keeps that spine lined up juuuust so.  But at any rate, he does have fun situations to work with (this Jinn pleads guilty for the guard's death before the body's in the ground, and finds an ingenious solution late in the film when he's about eight hundred souls behind); you've just gotta listen and not look, I guess.

The other actors are all fine, I suppose, though the material they're given doesn't exactly shine.  Morgana (that's the burglar) is told that she must be pure to defeat the Jinn, so she seeks Catholic penance (makes sense), starts dressing like a Good Girl (huh?) and cuts off her little finger (wait a sec...).  I'm confused.  In the end, she effectively just wishes for her purity back, though not in so many words.

Some of the "wishes" - really, this movie asks mostly to be judged on its wishes -are sufficiently amusing, particularly where one guy literally fucks himself.  But some of them are ridiculous; one guy picks an absurdly inappropriate time to sob "I wish I'd never been born!", and when a cop says "Freeze!", that doesn't sound like a wish to me, but that's exactly what the Jinn does to him.  And the Jinn is awfully obstinate about the rules for wishing late in the film; he keeps lawyering around wishes for him to disappear and the like.

And we finally get to a conclusion of good gore FX and bad visual FX, with all sorts of storytelling nonsense (yes, there's a climactic use of magic words).  I guess we can't expect too much from a movie like this; for what it is, it's diverting, but unexceptional.

Written and directed by Jack Sholder, who I think we have to conclude merely fluked out with The Hidden.

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