Spring break in Mexico goes wrong as a group bland yet also somehow unpleasant college students play a drunken game that ends up having real-life consequences. It’s like
The Ring meets
Final Destination, only infinitely small and petty and cruel. BFFs Olivia (Lucy Hale) and Markie (Violett Beane) and their pals find themselves facing demonic smiley-faced spectres who pop up to challenge them to truth or dare. They can’t refuse to play, they can’t lie, and they can’t fail to complete a dare, or else they die in some sensational and improbable way. Forget the supernatural element, though: It’s the human “drama” that the forced truth-telling spawns that is the most ridiculous thing going on here. There was barely a plausible human relationship here to begin with, but the secrets and hidden traumas that are revealed are nothing but laughable. And then
Truth or Dare finds a “solution” to its evil so sociopathic that it’s appalling, even when grading on the dumpster-fire-horror-flick curve. Movies of cheap would-be scariness often revel in their nasty inhumanity, and that is the only element in which this one excels.
By
MaryAnn Johanson