Truth Or Dare

I went to the cinema today intending to finally see Isle Of Dogs but got my times mixed up so decided on Truth Or Dare instead. Sometimes you stumble across a masterpiece by mistake. You sit down to watch a film you know nothing about and it turns out to be fantastic. It's a lovely surprise when it happens and a genuine pleasure discovering a film you know you'll watch repeatedly in the future.

None of those last 3 lines apply here sadly. Truth Or Dare was shit.

6 friends go on their final year Spring Break to Mexico. On the last night one of them, Olivia, gets them all invited to a party in a decrepit old convent by a bloke she's just met. They play truth or dare and when they get home they find that, somehow the game and all it's ramifications has followed them home.

It's never good when a film peaks in it's first 2 minutes. Truth Or Dare opens with a panicky scene in a convenience stores that immediately grips you in a "what the hell is going on?" way but sadly it's all down hill from there. It's premise is intriguing. Tell your deepest secrets to the people you love or you will die, but it's totally wasted. It's populated with the type of rich spoiled beautiful people you can't make a connection with ensuring you don't care what happens to them and the type of horror tropes and cliches that were old hat in the 1980's. The characters slot perfectly into the types you always see in these films too. The good girl, the tramp, the jock, the token minority character. And they all die in exactly the order you'd expect too and sadly they don't even get a gooey demise to you to laugh/shudder at.

The PG-13 rating in America has a lot of answer for. It's a rating that allows children under 13 to go see a film as long as their parents are with them. Movie studios love it. All those families and all the money they can make off them. Because of this a lot of films that are pretty unsuitable for kids are made with this rating in mind. Thrillers get their edges rounded off, love stories are shorn of love scenes and horror films are churned out tame and anaemic. Truth Or Dare is one such casualty of this money making exercise. It's a film that's as tame and toothless as they come. Had the filmmakers been allowed to go all out with the premise this could have been fun like the Final Destination movies. The joy in that series wasn't the characters but the tension in seeing what bizarrely bloody ending they had in store for them. This approach would have made this far more enjoyable. But one early pool table moment aside this film takes the wimpy way out whenever possible.

The cast are entirely unmemorable too. Lucy Hale in the lead stands out only because she gets more screentime than the rest. The others might as well be an amorphous grey blob in the background, the blokes especially considering I had trouble with telling 3 of them apart. You also get the sense the story was made up as it went along instead of working from a fully formed story. Later scenes of the movie betraying its own internal logic seen to confirm this turning a boring film into a disjointed mess. It does one thing I appreciated though. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares and loud noises. This is something that plagues modern horror and nothing makes me roll my eyes faster. Had this approach been welded to a better story we could have been on to something but sadly we'll never know.

Save your money. This will be on netflix within 6 months.