Genie, Make a Wish review: Kim Woo-bin and Bae Suzy’s Dubai-set fantasy is sweet, charming and full of heart

After watching Genie, Make a Wish, the first thing that comes to mind is a Roald Dahl quote.  Never do anything by halves. Be outrageous. Go the full hog if you have to.

 And, that’s the show’s unsaid motto.

It doesn’t intend to play safe at all; it wants to experiment and live up to its wackiness and joyful silliness, but with heart, and that’s in the right place. Moreover, the story strays from the usual supernatural, comfortable format, where there’s always a twist regarding the mystical fate of one of the characters. Genie messes with the obvious.

 The story: As Kim Woo-bin’s genie explains in the beginning itself in an albeit lengthy exposition, he is done with humans. He thinks they’re fully corrupt, and makes a deal with his deity that he can steer clear of hell, if he can corrupt and tempt humans and drag them down to hell. Yet: If he meets one person who is pure, then he has a worse fate awaiting him. Only once did he meet such a person: A girl who used her dying wishes to save others. Owing to his failure, he is banished to the lamp for a millenia.

He runs into the rather cold, blank and indifferent Ki Ka-young (Bae Suzy), a small-town mechanic, who is on vacation in Dubai. She has hints of Seo Yea-ji’s Moon Ka-young from It’s Okay to be Not Okay, but in muted colours. She lives with her grandmother, as her mother once abandoned her as a child.  

But, she actually has very twisted, dark intrusive, worrying thoughts, which even Iblis is baffled to notice.

She can’t shake him off, as they fly around Dubai. But as they spend time together, he realiises through her three wishes: There’s more to this confusing, frustrating woman. Beneath her icy quiet, lies an actual fear of losing something close to her: And that’s only her grandmother.  Moreover, Iblis and Ka-young have, obviously a romantic past, and keeping to the familiar format of memory erasure, he has no recollection of their tryst.

For those who watched Uncontrollably Fond back in 2016, starring both Woo-bin and Suzy, you almost fear that the ending is going to resemble a similar fate.

There’s a sudden wrench in the zany, romantic, slapstick comedy; the tonal shifts seem to be tectonic. It moves fast, and in the midst of much grief: Kim Eun-sook pulls an UNO reverse card, different to what she had done with Goblin, which leaned towards a bittersweet tone.

The show is ridiculously fun. It’s absurd, and the actors have a blast with its premise. Woo-bin delves fully into his comic leanings, showing a side of him that we haven’t really, properly witnessed before. The chemistry between him and Suzy, is quite enjoyable, even if it isn’t as intense and consuming as it was in Uncontrollably Fond.

Genie, Make a Wish doesn’t care for logic, restraint, or subtlety. It’s messy, chaotic, flawed, skitchy and fun, the kind of drama that asks you to stop nitpicking and just ride the magic carpet of absurdity.