Diana Collins (A.J.Cook Final Destination 2') unwittingly awakes the malicious Djinn (John Novak) who quickly assumes the identity of college professor Joel Barash (Jason Connery). The Djinn then enters a cat and mouse game with Diana in a bid to persuade her to make three wishes and thus condemning the world to an eternity of suffering.
This second sequel is the first movie in the series not to feature Andrew Divoff in the role of the Djinn. Instead, two people play the role, Connery plays the Djinn in human form and Novak assumes the character of the Djinn in demon form. Connery, to his credit, was not as bad a choice as I had first suspected. He managed to portray the Djinn with almost the right air of malevolence. However, Connery's near-powerful performance was let down by the performances of the rest of the cast. Even A.J. Cook, who put in a fairly good performance two years later in Final Destination 2', really failed to impress as she came off as dry, unenthusiastic and generally monotonous.
The movie itself started off reasonably well enough but eventually degenerated into a tedious and overly dragging example of bad horror filmmaking. The plot became very predictable and the screenplay just did not flow well and left the film with continuous moments of pointless, and forced, dialogue. On top of this the script seemed to show little tangency with the previous instalments and, as with Wishmaster 2', the `rules' of how the Djinn can interact with humans was changed. Also added were some unnecessary and (in many cases) ludicrous plot twists that made Wishmaster 3' all that more difficult to watch. There was however some impressive (and plentiful) gore effects, though these were overshadowed by the overuse of cheap looking and unnecessary CGI. Chris Angel's direction was also of a very low standard as it showed little inspiration or creativity. In fact, the scenes stolen from the previous two instalments were robbed of any darkness that was evident in the other movies.
Overall this is a very poor movie and only just on the same level as the previous instalment. Up to now I have not been a fan of the Wishmaster' franchise, and this movie has done nothing to change my mind. Fans of the original might enjoy this more than I did, though many may not be very accepting of the new Djinn. This movie is not one I would recommend and probably only worth watching if nothing else is on TV. Uninspired, poorly directed and generally dull. My rating for Wishmaster 3: Devil Stone' 3.5/10.
