Well, they all can’t be good can they. Unfortunately, we’ve encountered the first clunker I’ve reviewed and it’s a bad one. Truth or Dare has an interesting conceit behind it’s narrative, yet mires that with ham fisted attempts at creating drama, characters playing moral superiority in situations when they are at fault, boring scares and very few likeable characters.
First is the actual plot. I actually thought that there was interesting concepts at play, unfortunately however, the movie abandons those ideas to spend it’s time making each character hate each other and create out of place and unoriginal backstories for the protagonists. A key example of this is when 20 minutes into the film, Olivia and Markie are making up after Tyson makes a remark that Olivia is in love with Markie’s boyfriend, Lucas, and Markie all of a sudden just casually drops the fact that her father committed suicide. I understand that it is an unfortunate thing, but there is absolutely no build up to that “reveal” and we are yet to even form connections to character so this ends up becoming a wasted plot point. Adding to that, Truth or Dare also makes sure to add every clichè to it’s protagonist. There is the annoying frat guy, the faithful boyfriend, the best friend hopelessly in love with her BF’s boyfriend etc. All of this together makes this movie become a feature length episode of Gossip Girl or The OC.
Saying that, I will give credit to a couple of actors. Despite being given horrendous material to work with, Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey and Hayden Szeto try their hardest to do something with it and while it doesn’t always hit the mark, I still appreciated the fact that they made attempts to act. However that can’t be said about the other actors such as Violett Beane and Sam Lerner, who take their one not characters and dismally fail to even to that justice. This is honestly too bad, as there is some genuine talent that tries to claw its way out of this pile of steaming garbage.
The worst of this movie’s problems are the scares however. Horror movies have a luxury that other genres such as thrillers and dramas don’t, in that they don’t require necessarily good acting to succeed. What it does need is proper horror in it, whether that be atmospheric or through jump scares, as long as they are good it doesn’t matter. Truth or Dare doesn’t do any of this though, instead relying on repeating the same creepy smile over and over until it becomes boring and putting characters into situations that are at best mildly cringe-worthy, as opposed to going all out with it’s dares in a way such as the Saw franchise does. Because of this, both the terrible acting and horror elements exemplify each other, feeding each other’s dreadfulness.
There is a final positive, being that it is actually well shot. I was surprised by the variety and creativity of the camera shots and I wouldn’t mind seeing the team behind it continue working on other projects, hopefully ones of a better quality.
In the end, Truth or Dare throws away some good ideas and acting in favour of repetition of boring horror and acting that would be out of place in even the worst of soap operas. Just barely a 4/10, leaning on 3/10.
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