Film Review: Truth or Dare (2018) Director's Cut
Welcome to Smiling Demon Double Feature! The first review is for Truth or Dare (2018) Director’s Cut and the second one will be for Smile (2022). I had no idea that this had supernatural elements and thought it was a slasher with a typical cast of pretty young things getting picked off one by one by a masked killer; instead, I got a typical cast of pretty young things getting picked off one by one by a demonic entity that takes its party games a little too seriously. Warning: SPOILERS.
A group of friends travels to Mexico for Spring Break and becomes trapped in a supernatural game of Truth or Dare that won’t stop until they’re all dead.
The movie opens with a desperate young woman, Giselle, setting someone on fire at a gas station following instructions only she can hear. She says she has no choice, but as we’ll find out later on, that’s pretty much bullshit. Sure, dying isn’t an appealing option, but by the time you’re setting people on fire, you might want to rethink your life choices; after all, even if the game stopped, Giselle would still be guilty of murder and end up in prison for life. Despite that little detail, this intro gives the audience a pretty good idea of what awaits the new batch of players. They are: Olivia, the good girl who’d rather spend her last Spring Break working for Habitats for Humanity than go party with her friends in Mexico; Markie, Olivia’s messy best friend, who’s still traumatized by her father’s suicide and can’t stop cheating on her boyfriend; Lucas, Markie’s boyfriend who has a not-so-secret crush on Olivia; Penelope, who seems unable to stop drinking and making out with her boyfriend; Tyson, Penelope’s med student boyfriend who sells illegal prescriptions; Brad, who’s gay and hasn’t come out to his homophobic father; and Ronnie, who isn’t really part of the group but keeps following them, or more accurately, Olivia, around. Markie is the only one who seems to possess something akin to a personality, though there’s no attempt to explain her constant cheating (is she a nympho? A sex addict? What? Why?). Everyone else is a type and the only genuinely surprising development was Lucas telling Olivia that while he does have some feelings for her, he’s actually in love with Markie. Even Brad’s issues with his father lead to nothing as the audience doesn’t even get to see him coming out after the evil game forces him to. Penelope and Tyson are fine as the very secondary characters they are. Since I got a soft spot for pen/pencil stabbings, I won’t complain about Tyson, but Penelope’s death was just dumb. Ronnie is an even more secondary character and the obvious choice as the first death. By the way, though there are shootings and stabbings, Truth or Dare also likes crushing bones with appropriately crunchy sound effects.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, Markie gets Olivia to join them in getting drunk, dancing, and all the other things Americans usually do during Spring Break. It’s Olivia who meets Carter and convinces the others to follow him to an isolated, abandoned house, which turns out to be an old Catholic Mission, where they could’ve easily all been robbed, killed, or kidnapped by human traffickers. Did I mention these characters are dumb? They are. Once there, Olivia finds a stinky broken pot with a skull drawing. However, instead of getting the hell out of the obviously cursed/haunted/possessed house, the group plus Ronnie agree to play Truth or Dare with this clearly shady stranger. Being the good girl that she is, Olivia declares that if she had to choose between her friends and the entire population of Mexico, she’d pick the latter. Everyone is shocked, but she insists that it’s the only possible choice thus telegraphing the character’s planned development. There are some mild secrets revealed, including the obvious crush Lucas has on his girlfriend’s best friend. When it’s his turn, Carter truthfully explains that he brought them there because, unlike Olivia, he doesn’t care if others die so he can live, and he hopes that the more people get stuck in the game, the more time he’ll have without having to play. Naturally, no one believes him.
Once the group returns to the US, they start getting plagued by requests to play Truth or Dare. These can only be seen by whoever’s turn it is, and come in the shape of graffiti, text messages, burnt marks, mirror reflections, or creepy, smiling, possessed people. If the player refuses to play or doesn’t do as they were told, they get possessed by the creepy, smiling entity running the game and are forced to kill themselves. The group must play in the order they played in Mexico, and the truths and dares’ riskiness is pretty random. So, after initially forcing Markie to break Olivia’s hand, which she does at Olivia’s insistence, the entity remains content with messing up theirs and Lucas’s relationships with demonic mean girl malice. It dares Olivia to sleep with Lucas and then forces Lucas to tell the truth about whom he really loves while they’re having sex. Then, after Olivia admits she could never pick Truth because there’s a secret she could never ever, ever tell Markie, it dares her to, you guessed it, tell Markie said secret. God, these characters are dumb! On the other hand, Penelope’s first turn consists of walking on the roof while drunk, and Brad’s second turn makes him steal his father’s gun, which ends with him being shot by another cop. When the group (minus Ronnie and Tyson, who are both already dead) find Giselle, they learn a very important rule: if the previous 2 players picked truth, the third one has to pick dare. Oh, and it was one of her friends, Sam (now, who could that possibly be?), who trashed the old Mission house and broke the stinky pot with the skull. The meeting ends with Penelope dead after Giselle is told to shoot Olivia and Penelope jumps in front of the bullet. Hmm, why? Markie, Lucas, and Brad were right there, and it was the permanently drunk one still shaken up by her boyfriend’s death and her own nearly deadly Dare who took a bullet for Olivia? It’s like the movie wanted to get rid of the character and didn’t know how.
The backstory for the entity and the Mission isn’t bad. The demon’s name is Calux, he’s a trickster, and he was summoned by the girls that lived at the Mission to get rid of the abusive priest. It worked, but then Calux didn’t go away and all the girls died save Inez, who performed a ritual to get rid of him. The only person who can do it is the one who unleashed him and in addition to reading an incantation, must also cut off their tongue as a sacrifice. At the time, Calux possessed the girls’ game of hide and seek, and now it possessed Giselle and her friends’ game of Truth or Dare. This means only Sam can stop Calux but they don’t even know if he’s alive or dead because the movie clearly thinks the audience is too dumb to figure out that Sam is Carter and of course he’s not dead yet. They all return to Mexico after the surviving trio of Olivia, Markie, and Lucas find him so he can perform the ritual and free them all. However, Calux isn’t in the mood to end the game yet, and stops them by possessing Lucas after he refuses his Dare and killing Sam before he can stick his severed tongue in the pot. I got some questions about this tongue cutting business: why does it look like both Inez and Sam only cut the tip of their tongues? And why did they take a knife instead of a pair of scissors, which seems it might’ve made the cutting part easier? Moving on, this leaves only Olivia and Markie and no way to stop the game except either die or bring in more players. This of course means Olivia is faced with the same choice from their first game. That it would come to this was obvious from the moment Brad asked her that weirdly specific, non salacious question. Frankly, I would’ve been more surprised if she had chosen differently. In fact, I thought she was going to get Markie to kill herself when she tricked Calux into answering her question about how to stop playing (answer: DIE). Instead, Olivia posts a video on her YouTube channel explaining about the game and asking people to play it with them. On one hand, I can appreciate the darkness of the ending; on the other hand, absolutely nothing justifies this choice and I just couldn’t buy Olivia making it after everything she’d seen. Worse, we don’t even get Markie’s reaction. Is she really fine with dooming everyone who watches that video? It’s one thing to talk about hypothetical scenarios, but now they’re killing real people. From the little that was shown of them, I could believe Giselle and Sam were selfish enough to make that choice. Tyson, Penelope, and Ronnie would’ve been a better final trio, but Olivia, Lucas, and Markie? The greyest Olivia gets is being upset that Lucas doesn’t love her, Lucas is self-sacrificing to the end, and Markie is reduced to following her friend’s instructions. That Olivia manages to project blandness even when she’s pointing a gun at someone really doesn’t help. This type of plot demands some real character progression as despair settles in and everyone’s carefully maintained facades begin to crack, exposing the ugliness underneath, but there’s no twist revealing a hidden facet of her personality. The movie tries to work around it by giving her Markie as motivation, but the character simply lacks the edge or coldness necessary to choose to sacrifice a bunch of innocent people. It’s funny because I could see Markie making that decision for Olivia, but she ends up being mostly sidelined during the final confrontation.
VERDICT
Truth or Dare Director’s Cut was better than I expected, but I wasn’t expecting much. The characters are dumb, thinly sketched, and Olivia was not a good choice of lead. We don’t see much of Calux as himself, but the nature of the game and Inez’s story helped give him some personality. Also, all the smiling was creepy. A lot more could’ve been done with this concept, but in the end, this turned out to be a pretty average movie.
By Danforth