“Truth or Dare” manages only a handful of tense moments, partially because the audience has no true investment in the generic cast, but more so because the movie never generates the kind of tone or atmosphere to really engage the audience.

“Scary,” of course, is a relative term here. Unlike “Quiet Place,” which placed irreplaceable value on each member of its tormented family, the characters in “Truth or Dare” are barely more than cannon fodder, included only to provide additional “scary” opportunities for a grisly demise. “Truth or Dare” is pretty much another lowball teen horror film that doesn’t aspire to more than a few cheap frights. It’s hard to think Wadlow and his team had anything that weighty in mind, though. So Olivia and Markie set out to learn how to end the game, which leads to enough trips back and forth across the Mexican border to make you wonder if the whole film is some kind of immigration metaphor.

The players are killed off if they refuse to cooperate, and it soon becomes clear that cooperating is just as deadly a proposition. are surprised when supernatural forces start terrorizing them in the middle of their day-to-day lives, demanding that they confess horrible secrets in public or perform increasingly sadistic dares, including walking along the edge of a rooftop while polishing off a bottle of hard liquor. The game picks at the thin relationships between the characters, such as Olivia’s secret crush on her best friend Markie's (Violett Beane) boyfriend Lucas (Tyler Posey), but once the group returns home, things get much more diabolical.Ĭarter warned them that the game was a real life-or-death predicament, but still Olivia and Co. While on their trip south of the border, a mysterious stranger named Carter (Landon Liboiron) tricks Olivia and her friends into playing a spontaneous game of truth or dare in an abandoned mission. The film’s protagonist is Olivia (Lucy Hale), an aspiring humanitarian who gets manipulated into ditching her Habitat for Humanity project to join her friends for one last spring break in Mexico before “life tears (them) apart.”

The story follows a group of indistinguishable teens as they desperately try to escape a sadistic game of truth or dare that is killing them off. Hollywood’s recent streak of good scary movies just ended … at one.Ĭoming fast on the heels of John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place,” Jeff Wadlow’s “Truth or Dare” is the unfortunate inverse of its multiplex neighbor, matching each of “Quiet Place’s” skillful turns with an inept move of its own.

“TRUTH OR DARE” - 1½ stars - Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane, Hayden Szeto, Nolan Gerard Funk, Sophia Ali PG-13 (violence and disturbing content, alcohol abuse, some sexuality, language and thematic material) in general release

Truth or dare the movie 2018