Lindsay Lohan could have wished for a better movie

Let’s get one thing straight: Netflix needs Lindsay Lohan, not the other way around. After Lohan’s long-awaited, perfectly decent holiday romance Fall for Christmas marked her official film comeback in 2022, the power dynamic has shifted. Lohan wasn’t just hireable, but she returned to the screen tapping into that effervescent, enigmatic quality that made her a superstar from the jump. And people wanted more.

The audience enjoyed the bit and foamed at the mouth for liters of LiLo. The reaction alone until Lohan’s return to Vanity Fair Last weekend’s Oscar party was enough to confirm that the former tabloid darling is back in style. It’s that kind of raucous excitement that makes Lohan’s latest Netflix film, Irish desire, such a disappointment. Where Fall for Christmas felt like an event—one that, of course, had the magical Rudolphian red hue of the holidays working in its favor—Irish desire plays like a run-of-the-mill rom-com that’s dropped on its head and stumbles around trying to convince everyone it doesn’t have a concussion.

Christmas movies are expected to have a tolerable level of kitsch. That’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 desire is boring, horribly flat and completely devoid of laughs, and is a vacuum of charisma when its star is not in the frame. Netflix might be a safe place for Lohan to get her groove back, but Irish desire is just proof that she has a lot more to offer than the lack of streaming can afford her.

In the film, Lohan plays Maddie, a clumsy book editor with a soft heart and an inability to stand up for herself. We learn this at the top of the film when Maddie’s scarf gets caught in her cabin door and the car peels off with it stuck inside—thankfully leaving her without a trip to the emergency room and a critical neck injury. This physical comedy is exactly what Lohan is so good at and acting, and Irish desire is full of those moments. They are also clever tools to distract from the fact that the film has almost no plot. It’s as if the physical antics come first and the rest is put together once the cast lands in Ireland.

Fortunately, the movie was shot on location in the Emerald Isle, which at least makes it a nice watch (even if the color saturation is dialed up a lot). Maddy and her friends are in Ireland for the wedding of Maddy’s most successful author, Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), who is not the James Kennedy of Vanderpump Rules, though you’ll probably continue to think the characters mean it. This confusion of names isn’t helped by the fact that there’s another guest at the wedding named James (Ed Spelliers), whom Maddie meets at the airport after a contentious confrontation over a suitcase at baggage claim. But regardless of the pop culture confusion, the band is just there to have a good time! Well, at least they would be, if only Maddy wasn’t in love with Paul and jealous of her friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan) for taking the author off her hands.

It’s that jealousy Irish desire uses to create his strange, mystical central plot. Maddy meets a strange woman in a field who turns out to be the little trickster who is Ireland’s patron saint Brigid (you may have heard of St. Brigid’s friend, St. Patrick). St. Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who is written as a parody of Casey Wilson and dressed head to toe in clothes from Chico’s rack, grants Maddie’s wish to be the one to marry Paul. This, naturally, thrusts Maddie into an alternate universe where she soon discovers that her mutual romance with Paul isn’t all she’d imagined.

This kind of absurdist comedy is nothing new for Lohan. She lashed out at expletives Just luck and body switching Crazy Friday. She alone is the reason this film has any redeeming qualities. Lohan is the only one capable of delivering dialogue as if it’s not being read by a five-year-old who can understand the words but still doesn’t know how to properly punctuate them in a sentence. Spellers and Ayesha Curry, who plays Maddie’s best friend Heather, approach Lohan’s naturalism, but even they are hampered by a frankly confusing script.

But it’s not just the dialogue that disappoints. Irish desire is a really poorly made movie, even by Netflix rom-com standards. An early clip from Maddie and Paul’s party of Maddie and her friends in a car, around town, comes with a positive roaring a musical cue that wasn’t mixed into the film at all. It almost blew my eyebrows off and I watched the “car” drive through a green background on the screen that looked more like that of the Wachowski sisters Speedracer or Rainbow Road in Mario Kart didn’t help that irritation factor either. The editing for any sequence that doesn’t require some major physical entertainment is sloppy and inelegant. There’s only so much beauty that can be captured on Ireland’s coast without anyone interfering, and director Janeane Damien’s eye seems to be on the fritz.

These physical comedy bits are a few minor highlights though. 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 Maddy stumbles upon Paul is especially good because Lohan turns on the switch she’s turned off to become big, bold, and distinctive, finally making Maddy hers. At times, Lohan seems to be actively opting for restraint, as if stepping back to let the actors whose names appear below her on the call sheet shine. It’s a nice gesture, but they rarely, if ever, do it. In fact, these people can’t even return the favor to Lohan. At one point Maddy’s friends ask her to take their picture as if Maddy is a zookeeper. No one forges an ounce of chemistry, and Lohan navigates them all with ease.

The ratio of laughter to silence in Irish desire it’s stunning, like peering into a bowl of lucky charms and looking for the marshmallows: there just aren’t enough of them! Lohan is an actor with an innate comedic timing, a penchant for slapstick humor and a deep capacity for emotion. We don’t want Lohan back in a Nancy Meyers movie (although she deserves just that). Viewers just want to watch something that isn’t tasteless and horribly made. Maybe that’s what Lohan is working on, and if her bright, shining star is any indication, a bigger role isn’t far off. We know she’s back into romantic comedies and Irish desire it might as well be her foray into the horror genre, based on how terrifyingly brutal it is. Time to see what Lohan can do in a drama.