Truth or Dare (2017): Why Do We Keep Doing This to Ourselves???

I think we all can agree that, after the Rape of Nanking, we needed a little break. Something light. Something palatable. Something to skyrocket our blood pressure - but a healthy amount. Something like…

Truth or Dare?

Aww, what gave it away?

Yes, it’s true. We’re doubling up on our bad-horror minisodes because, man, don’t we need a little levity in our lives? And we sure got what we bargained for. Truth or Dare (the 2017 Netflix version, not the 2018 Blumhouse version) is a giant bag of questionable decisions - and not just from the characters. 

Since the episode is a review, I’ll give a brief summary and an overview of our major complaints. But for the full maniacal-laughter-y effect, we highly recommend watching the movie and listening to the episode. Without further ado:

What’s Truth or Dare About?

In a nutshell, eight friends (though Olivia and I chronically bungle the number in the episode), Alex, Maddie, Tyler, Jessie, Luke, Holt, Addison, and Tyler, get together on Halloween night to spend the evening being spooky in a spooky house where a group of friends met their grisly ends thirty years prior. The legend goes that these friends died playing a game of Truth or Dare gone wrong, so our protagonists (if you can call them that) decide to do the same. 

The game quickly goes badly, as an evil spirit takes over and forces them to do increasingly-life-threatening tasks to fulfill dares. If you don’t do the dare within the time limit, the dare forces itself on you. Or you die. The rules are hazy. But they have to complete 3 rounds of the game within 48 hours to survive.

Once one of their friends dies, the friends are allowed to leave the house for some reason. It takes 10 hours for the game to reveal itself again, immediately resuming rapid-fire killing the friends. They find the only survivor from the previous game, who tells them to return to the house and finish the game for some reason. They do, and all but two of the friends die. In the last round (SPOILER ALERT I GUESS) Alex is tasked to kill Maddie and decides, rationally, to slam their car into a tree instead. The screen goes black, both girls take a breath, and the credits roll. Seriously.

That’s… Some Story

Nope!

I’m not knocking the “group of people have to overcome insurmountable odds and be very smart to survive” genre. I watched and even enjoyed Saw for what it was. Escape Rooms are dope. And this could have been interesting if the movie stuck to its guns and just put interesting characters in a seemingly-impossible situation and let the cards fall where they may. Instead, it features glorified soap opera plotting for characters with zero relatability - or even likeability. 

And it isn’t just a matter of them needing to be smart to outwit the game, as the movie tries to suggest. In a mystifying writing choice, the characters are only smart as the plot requires them to be, but otherwise lose all previous knowledge of the game and become morons. And in the rare moments where they are smart and work to overcome the challenges, the game forces their deaths in weird, contrived ways so their efforts don’t matter. It’s frustrating and unsatisfying for the viewer, and I cannot fathom how this version of the script made it past test audiences.

Are the Characters Interesting, At Least?

You’d think, with the number of cast members, that they’d have to be.

Guess again!

All eight of these people are, as Olivia put it, “xeroxes of xeroxes” (thanks, Bojack Horseman). They have nearly no identifying characteristics outside of “he’s the baseball guy. She’s the addict. She’s afraid of bugs.” The characters have exactly as much information and backstory presented as the plot requires and not a shred more. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, they suck so hard. Every single one of these characters is mean or creepy or both to one another.

I feel like there’s a tendency in writing young characters to think that friendly ribbing is actually ruthless insulting, and it always always always comes across as cruel. Never once have I spoken to my friends the way these people do. I wouldn’t want to. They recreationally hurt each other’s feelings and sexually harass one another. And some of them are dating each other! Cool and healthy!

I dislike every single one of these characters. They’re impossible to root for, and even harder to care about, which makes the movie kind of pointless. If there’s no one to root for against the demonic game, then why am I watching the movie?

Was There Anything Good About This Movie?

Olivia was glad that there was at least a working understanding of electricity for one of the game’s dares. At the very least, I enjoyed that the demon running the game seemed to be having fun. Seriously, I have never in my life seen a film with such a brazen ghost before. It was downright gleeful. Good for you, demon game. 

But yeah, that’s it. 

Was It Funny? Anything?

The crime of this film was that it was too mediocre to adequately entertain one way or the other. There were some funny one-liners (Shots? Shots? Shots? Everybody) and a pretty horrific misread of the script that was inexplicably left in the final cut, but otherwise it was just a half-baked idea with a quarter-baked script. I estimate this movie was made for about ten cents and a stick of chewing gum. Oh, and a strip of bacon they used to simulate burnt hand flesh. Not kidding.