Review: ‘Truth or Dare’ packs fun
Review The production company behind ‘Get Out’ and ‘Happy Death Day’ has another hit on its hands with this ‘Final Destination’-lite shocker
Given the current obsession with reboots, revisits and rehashes, it’s strange that the Final Destination franchise hasn’t cheated death and been dragged back to life after five films and $665 million (Dh2.4 billion) in the bank.
Blumhouse, the phenomenally successful company behind the latter is now hoping to milk yet more money from the death-heavy formula with Truth or Dare ,a slick college-set horror.
If the gasps and guffaws during my screening are any indication, it’s likely Blumhouse will have another crowdpleasing franchise on its hands with a nifty, if derivative, gimmick that lends itself to multiple sequels. Rather than a disaster-predicting premonition, this time it’s a cursed game that finds its way into the lives of a group of college kids, enjoying their final spring break in Mexico.
They’re led by Olivia (the Pretty Little Liars star Lucy Hale) who is a brunette so is therefore earnest and pure; she spends her time making YouTube videos to help support Habitat for Humanity. Her best friend, Markie (The Flash star Violett Beane), is blonde and is therefore rebellious and spends her time cheating on her boyfriend.
Along with their similarly well-drawn friends, they get dragged into playing a game of Truth or Dare inside a creepy chapel by a handsome stranger who reveals to them that he only took them there to save himself. They pass it off as drunken bluster but when they return to their normal lives, strange things start happening.
Each friend is visited by a demonic presence that overtakes the body of someone close to them in order to ask the all-important question. The rules of the game are simple: you choose truth or you choose dare. If you decide to skip, you die. It took four writers to come up with this.
After a rushed, entirely unscary opening scene and some rather dry character-setting dialogue, there are some smartly crafted titles that showcase the group’s vacation through social media posts alone. It’s indicative of the film that follows, which sees college students behaving like college students would, forever texting, snapping and gramming, one of the film’s more believable touches.
Slightly less believable are the specifics that get the group to play a game in a clearly haunted hill-top building, an awful decision that’s never justified as anything other than “something that would happen in a horror movie”. Along with the deadly game, this dim-witted behaviour follows them back home.
Hackneyed horror tropes persist throughout but it rattles along at a fair lick, never resting for too long before another nasty surprise. Even most of the death scenes feel rushed, highlighting the PG-13 rating that the film has secured, and one does miss the extravagance of the Final Destination franchise. Still, the director, Jeff Wadlow, has a puppyish eagerness to impress, shock and entertain and as silly as the film might get, it’s never dull.
With the remaining characters forced to turn detective in order to find the origin of the curse, the film starts feeling less like The Ring and more like Scooby-Doo. But Hale is a committed lead and it all builds to an audaciously nutty climax. There’s something oddly charming about the film’s dogged, goofy attempt to earnestly write the rules of a franchise that will clearly be haunting cinemas, or sleepovers, for years to come. Truth: it’s watchable trash. Dare: bring back Final Destination instead.