Genie, Make a Wish is a fantasy romantic comedy about an emotionally volatile genie (Kim Woo Bin) who is trapped in a lamp and grants three wishes to a woman (Suzy) with anti-social personality disorder who helps him escape.
Suzy plays Ki Ga Yeong. She has an anti-social personality disorder causing psychopathic tendencies. Her loving grandmother (Kim Mi Kyung) has raised her with care to help her fit in more, but she still faces many difficulties in life. Then things take an unexpected turn when she unleashes a genie.
Kim Woo Bin is a genie named Iblis, also known as Satan. After being trapped in his lamp for a thousand years, he is released and ready to take revenge on the person responsible for his captivity.
Then we have Steve Noh as Ryu Su Hyeon/Ejlael. He is an angel who is pitted against Iblis because of a rivalry dating back millennia.
Genie, Make a Wish was an interesting drama in many ways, but it was also a mixed bag for me. I always love a unique premise, and having a genie at the center of the story is a little more unique for a kdrama.
On the positive side, I did like the main story centering around Iblis and Ga Yeong and their long history. Kim Woo Bin and Suzy were both fantastic in their respective roles with a fun chemistry between them.
The drama comes from the writer of some very popular dramas that I enjoyed including Goblin: The Lonely and Great God, Descendants of the Sun, and Mr. Sunshine. It had a sizeable budget which is evidenced from the ample use of CGI and special effects. Some of it was a little wonky, but a lot of it was extremely well done. We also get some interesting locations including Dubai.
On the negative side, the overall tone of the drama was a bit odd with the plot being messy at times. The comedy also didn’t hit for me most of the time. The villains were fairly underwhelming as a whole too.
I didn’t love how the drama structured the overall story. We only get flashes of the back story for about half of the drama, and even going into the latter third, I still felt like we were missing a lot of important information.
We then get a big flashback episode at the very end, which was a very good episode, that dumps all of the missing information. I’m not usually a big fan of that type of structure as it leaves the audience in the dark for too long and can make certain elements a bit confusing, which was the case here.
I think the relationship between Iblis and Ga Yeong would have had a lot more meaning a lot sooner if we could have went deeper with this earlier in the drama. Because the more we learned about their story, the more invested I became. Now, they do have a very fun bickering type chemistry from the get go that had a certain fun chaos to it. It mostly stays in that territory, but the emotions do deepen as the drama progresses.
Iblis and Ga Yeong Each have important character journeys to go on. Iblis starts out with a sort of revenge mission and has a lot of growing to do as he learns more about Ga Yeong and humans.
Then Ga Yeong has struggled with psychopathic tendencies all of her life which complicates all of her relationships including the one with Iblis. I enjoyed exploring her character and all of the adjustments she makes in her life to not cause harm to others. She’s an interesting character on many levels, and we get some great developments with her.
So in the end, I did enjoy Genie Make a Wish. We had great performances from Kim Woo Bin and Suzy, and their characters were engaging. The story and production was solid, but the overall structure of the drama had quite a few issues. The tone was a bit odd, and sometimes the pacing suffered.
At times, it felt like the drama wanted to be very grand, and towards the end, it sometimes felt like that, but frequently, it did feel like it was trying a bit too hard and fell short. But overall, it was a fun ride if you don’t take it too seriously.
My Rating: 7/10
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