Truth or Dare Movie Review

“Truth or Dare” is no longer just a game or a bad Madonna documentary. Now it is an actual movie. It is “Final Destination” for the Snapchat Generation. “Final Destination” (from 18 years ago) was an intriguing look a group of kids who ‘cheated’ death, only to have death come back to take them one by one. Now many years later, this movie says that just playing a silly game in a place possessed by a demon can be bad for your life expectancy. Play the game, or else you DIE. Tell the Truth and lie, then you DIE. Play the Dare and do it wrong, then you DIE. Hey, mind if I live stream your gruesome death?

College student Olivia (Lucy Hale) and her Best Friend Forever Markie (Violett Beane) take a Spring Break trip to Mexico. They are joined by some friends who also come along. Lucas (Tyler Posey) who is Markie’s boyfriend, Brad (Hayden Szeto) the gay Asian friend, and Penelope (Sophia Ali) and her main squeeze Tyson (Nolan Gerard Funk). They are about to leave for home, but that night Olivia meets a guy named Carter (Landon Liboiron) at the bar. He convinces them all to come with min and play a little game. But soon the cat is out of the bag. Carter explains that they are all stuck in the ‘Truth or Dare’ game for life – literally.

Olivia is sort of the goody-goody type, and she wants to see everyone do well. But she is misled by Carter into the game, and now all the people in the group are involved. When they get back home, they are all haunted by an evil demon who forces them to one-by-one take a ‘Truth or Dare’ challenge. But if they refuse, or make a choice and do not deliver, then they are led to tragic end. But because it is a PG-13 movie, the death is not bloody or graphic (or the least bit interesting). But later on, the rules change, er – I guess the demon says they rules get refined. It sounds more like the four writers of this movie just kept coming up with new things to try to stick to the wall.

After a few members of their group get ‘Dared’ to death, they start doing the sleuthing thing, getting into every social media account ever (all on Apple machines, of course). They hunt down the ‘Carter’ guy who got them into this whole mess. They find some information about a ‘Dare’ murder that was in Mexico. It was done by a woman who was earlier possessed by the ‘Truth or Dare’ demon. They work their way down to Mexico and back several times. Olivia even meets with an old ex-sister who claims to know about the abandoned church in Mexico and the demon who took it over. The movie never takes a straight line in any direction. It zips and zigs and then it flips and flops over and over again. 

Seeing a group of ill-defined and uninteresting characters go through the motions of getting killed off in boring ways… what else could a horror movie fan want? There is no purpose behind this movie. There is little motivation to follow anything through. There are no likable characters and you feel no loss if one of them screws up against the evil ‘Truth or Dare’ demon. There is not all that much that makes any sense, except for some Apple product placement. The story goes all over the place, and the dialog is cheesy. But it is not cheesy enough to make it a guilty pleasure. It is just bad enough to make you lose interest.

All the actors make a true effort to seem like they are on board with this movie. But everything that need to do or say goes against them. The movie winds up flat and scattered, like a cardboard box run over in the middle of a Mexican dirt back road. The visual effects are goofy and cheap looking. They give the characters who taunt the main person into ‘Truth or Dare’ a weird Snapchat face filter that gives them crazy eyes and a Joker style mouth. There are couple of final scenes that do not even try to hide the fact that the ‘green screen’ technology was broken that day.

If someone gives you a ‘Dare’ to see this movie, tell them the ‘Truth’ – you would rather see a decent movie…