Truth or Dare

The premise of Truth or Dare, Blumhouse’s tent­pole release this Fri­day the 13^th, is exact­ly what you’d expect: a game of truth or dare that isn’t just embar­rass­ing, but also dead­ly. To find any­one who likes the game that inspired the film would be a chal­lenge, and not even the dumb­est of col­lege stu­dents would be offend­ed if any­one decid­ed not to play. Thus there is already some­thing very fun­ny and ter­ri­bly ill-thought-out about hav­ing the notion of back­ing out of the game be the thing that kills you.

And yet, this is exact­ly how the first death in the film plays out. At a stu­dent bar, a pret­ty girl that a col­lege bro wants to impress dares him to climb on a pool table and show his penis to all atten­dees. Bro climbs up, only to back out in a cloud of sec­ond-hand embar­rass­ment, con­fu­sion and exas­per­a­tion, before sud­den­ly falling off the pool table, break­ing his neck.

Is this real­ly the best hor­ror movie that could have been made based on this very dan­ger­ous game? Hell no. The Final Des­ti­na­tion-esque thrills and gore than this film real­ly should have been burst­ing with are all but absent. As unbe­liev­able as it made sound, Truth or Dare is more inter­est­ed in the sen­ti­men­tal dra­ma that the game gen­er­ates than in its mur­der­ous poten­tial, even when said game is also bru­tal­ly killing people.

The ten­sions that boil between the group of friends at the cen­tre of the film are set up very ear­ly on. Do-good­er Olivia (Lucy Hale) clear­ly has a thing for Lucas (Tyler Posey), who is actu­al­ly dat­ing Markie (Vio­lett Beane) who is Olivia’s best friend (OMG). On their last ever spring break in Mex­i­co, the gang meet a charm­ing young man who invites them over to a men­ac­ing desert­ed cas­tle where they pro­ceed to have some beers and, at long last, play the game of the title. Out of the blue, friend/​foe Tyson (Nolan Ger­ard Funk, from The Canyons) asks Olivia to tell the truth about her feel­ings for Lucas. The hor­ror! But no, no one dies just yet. Mov­ing on…

Back in the US, the kids start get­ting visions of peo­ple with dis­tort­ed smiles — ​“like a messed-up Snapchat fil­ter”, as Olivia so bril­liant­ly puts it — telling them ​“truth or dare”. And this is how Olivia, pick­ing ​“truth”, ends up scream­ing about Markie’s infi­deli­ty in the library… in front of a mor­ti­fied Lucas. EPIC FAIL.

Even once the kids begin under­stand­ing what is hap­pen­ing and attempt to repel the Mex­i­can curse, both the char­ac­ters and the film itself remain inor­di­nate­ly con­cerned with the pet­ty dra­ma of their tiny, tiny lives. Truth or Dare is inter­est­ing for how it total­ly miss­es the mark on why teens in slash­er films are so often despi­ca­ble, self-obsessed pricks: to pro­vide the sat­is­fac­tion of watch­ing them be killed off one by one by a crea­ture who has no regards for their feel­ings and con­cerns. As such, though the film pro­vides none of the thrills expect­ed, it is unde­ni­ably amus­ing — if only in an absurd, utter­ly mind-bog­gling way.