Three Wishes (1995)

If you like seemingly bottomless plot holes and unexplained characters and occurrences and merciless twanging of the sentimental heartstrings, "Three Wishes" is surely for you. From start to finish it has more questions than it has answers and it suddenly and rather desperately runs like mad to the finish line trying to tie things up in a neat little bow but fails miserably.Patrick Swayze is once again a ghost (unless of course he is an angel, this is NOT made at all clear). The neighbor kids all inexplicably dislike and bully the older brother. The younger brother is a scared and weird little boy with no reasons given for his behavior. There is a totally meaningless opening sequence with the rest of the film being a flashback. Mom is attractive. Her wanna-be beau is a bit of a creep. The drifter is first verbally abused (for no reason) by the local cop and then released from the hospital to sleep on a park bench. It's ALL a mystery. Was the drifter a professional baseball player ? Is he now an exhibitionist ? Do we care ? Will mom fall for the creep ? Will mom fall for the drifter ? Again, do we care ? What's with the little brother and the dreams, visions, nightmares ? Do we care ? Answer to all three is a resounding NO !No complaints about the acting as it is done as well as can be expected in this manipulative, confusing mess. Most appealing character is the dog ! A Real cutie !

This movie was billed as "fun for the whole family" -- NOT. It was awful. The setup/beginning of the movie has a lot of great possibilities. But it just gets stranger and stranger as the time goes on.A "Family friendly" movie DOES NOT include sunbathing in the nude, implied relations between mom and a drifter, cancer/deadly disease for the little brother, flying around in the sky, and losing your business and home as an adult. Depressing and weird.My 6 and 8 year old may not have picked up on some of the innuendos but from age 72 to age 6 we all hated it.

This story of a young mother of two son's whose husband is missing and presumed dead in the Korean War touches your heart. Jeanne Holman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio)hits a drifter, Jack McCloud (Patrick Swayze)with her car on the way to a picnic. Later she finds him sleeping on a bench with his leg in a cast and insists that he stay at her house until his leg is better. The two boys; Tommy (Joseph Mozzello) and Gunny (Seth Mumy) gradually come to care for Jack and Jack cares for the family.The lesson, "instead of wishing for things to make you happy; wish to be happy with what you have" is such an important truth in today's life but one that is difficult to remember when we all want what the neighbor has! The movie set - of brand new developments with thousands of houses exactly alike and looking very bare because trees have not had time to grow yet - is a nostalgic setting from that time in history.Patrick Swayze as Jack McCloud, is good in this part of a drifter who has stumbled into the life of Jeanne Holman right when she needed friendship, support and understanding. It seems that a lot of Swayze's characters have an elusive quality of melancholy, of an acceptance that there is something special between two people that can't be defined or captured;looked at closely; or held and kept safe like a firefly in a quart jar. Jack McCloud is one of these characters along with Jed Eckart (Red Dawn), Johnny Castle (Dirty Dancing), Sam Wheat (Ghost), Ms. Vida Boheme (To Wong Foo...), Ben Clifton (Forever Lulu /Along for the Ride), Max Lowe (City of Joy) and even Allan Quatermain (King Solomon's Mines). Swayze's character Jack Charles of Father Hood was open, brash, funny and most importantly - hopeful who learned to love his children. Donnie Darko's Jim Cunningham (Swayze) was a snake-oil salesman who under it all was really slime with real no depth of any kind being developed in that character.

Certainly a mixed bag of comments on this one. I'm definitely one of this film's boosters. I saw it long ago on a motel tv in the middle of the night and have never forgotten it. My memory was that it was an 80s movie; I suppose because most of the plot was set in the 50s. When I rediscovered that it was made as late as 1995 I was quite surprised. The fact that women directors and writers were so heavily involved with this movie explains its beautiful emotional resonance. Even now as I write this I'm again deeply moved by the whole story and its telling. To me it's right up there with films like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Miracle on 34th Street," etc. Recently TCM has been featuring great women screen writers like Frances Marion and April Guy Blache. I'm glad to discover that women are still and again strongly contributing to our collective screen world of emotions and feelings. Too bad this sensitive approach seems to turn some of your reviewers strongly off. Perhaps it's a gender thing.