Olivia (Lucy Hale), Markie (Violett Beane), and their college friends go for a final wild spring break in Mexico. There, another partier (Landon Liboiron) tricks them into a game of truth or dare. The game is “possessed” and they are then forced to continue playing or die, where the “truths” are terribly upsetting and the “dares” tend to be fatal.
Truth or Dare isn’t as bad as its reputation would suggest (I’ve seen in repeated called one of the three worst films of the year). It is well made and well acted. The characters are engaging when they need to be, and reasonably defined when they exist only to be cannon fodder. It’s problem is that it is so thoroughly generic. Until the ending, this is like 500 other horror films. A bit more skill was involved in its making then such movies often are granted, but that just makes it a skillful rehash. Early twenty-year-olds bicker and flirt and scream and run and get picked off one by one. There’s nothing they can do about it till the end. Blood is kept to PG-13 levels and nothing gets too scary. We’ve seen this before; well, I’ve seen it before. If this came out in 1985 I’d probably give it a positive rating. If it come out in 1965 I’d be raving about it (maybe a soft rave). But in 2018, it’s a patchwork of previous movies. There is not a single moment you won’t predict, even down the order of the deaths.
And then there is the ending, which has come in for the harshest criticism for being plagiarized. But everything about the film is plagiarized. The ending stands out because it was only plagiarized from one film instead of hundreds. I rather like the ending, and I think this might have been a decent horror flick if it worked harder to earn that ending (by cutting way back on the bickering and focusing on Olivia and Markie’s close and unbreakable friendship and love. But they didn’t. Still, the end did make me smile as at least it didn’t stick with the expected finale from those other hundred films.
So this isn’t a bad film on its own. It simply has no reason to exist.