Monday Blues: Truth or Dare?

               You know those movies where the premise was good, execution was good but characters development killed the potential? Well, picture that but with an eye-roll inducing premise and terrible execution. I’ve chosen Truth or Dare for today’s pick so read on and be sure to avoid this movie tonight.

                The story centers on a group of college friends going on a road trip to Mexico (nobody was shooting for originality points, here) where they encounter a friendly stranger at a bar. After a night of tequila fueled college kid shenanigans, they decide to follow said stranger on a little hike to an abandoned hospital and play a game of “Truth or Dare”. If you’re anything like me, the words “freaking why?” might have gone through your head at some point but for the sake of the script, we’ll buy it for now. This decision turns out to be a very bad one as the members of the group start seeing “spooky” things. It isn’t long before one by one, the group start getting tormented by a  demon (resembling a Snapchat filter) who asks the same question over and over. The rules are simple, you don’t play, you die. You don’t tell the truth, you die. You don’t do the dare, you die. You choose truth too many times, you die. Basically if you’re not ruining or endangering your own or someone else’s life, you die.

                Even through all this nonsense, the character development is still where this film fails most. The “truth” aspects of the game involve petty drama along the lines of “who’s trying to steal whose boyfriend?” The hard part is seeing this group of friends that you’re so rooting for by now to put these huge problems aside to save their friends who are being killed off one by one. Let that sink in for a minute. Who in their right mind would be stressing over trivial matters when there’s a literal demon trying to make you gouge your own eye out with a pen or break your friend’s hand with a hammer?

                The film is predictable, the characters are lame and the story isn’t much better. One positive point I can make is that the movie sells exactly what it gives. From the trailer, audiences can tell what they’re getting and for this audience member, it was the Monday blues. It's strange, I usually don’t mind Mondays.