Truth Or Dare (2018) Review

There’s an almost gleeful stupidity at the heart of “Truth Or Dare” that you almost don’t want to look away just to see what audaciously moronic twist its going to try next. Almost.

Persuaded to go on one last Spring Break vacation, Olivia (Lucy Hale) meets a guy on the last night of the trip who tells her of a secret after-hours party. She manages to convince her friends to come along and the group find themselves in an abandoned and derelict chapel on a remote hillside. Once there, though, instead of a happening party, there’s a cooler of beers and a circle of chairs for a game of ‘Truth Or Dare’. But the whole thing is a trap and the game is real: if you don’t play, you die. If you pick ‘dare’ and don’t do it, you die. If you pick truth and tell a lie, you die.

It’s with this tedious predictability that the film trots out its demonically possessed version of the game, spinning it into a cut-price “Final Destination” knock-off as each unlikable and uninteresting character meets their maker in preposterous, convoluted circumstances. Never scary, rarely even so-bad-it’s-funny, “Truth Or Dare” compounds its lack of invention with an ending that’s breathtakingly brazen, unearned and, arguably, more malevolent than the demon who survives within a game yet tries as hard as possible to kill off all the players. It’s a narrative Hail Mary pass in the hopes of getting a sequel the film really doesn’t deserve. If your idea of terror is a malfunctioning Snapchat filter picking off a bunch of bland, stupid people then, by all means, check this movie out. Go on. I dare you.

2/10