Truth or Dare--A college senior (Lucy Hale), planning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on her last spring break, allows herself to be pressured into going to Mexico with her friends instead. Down there, a stranger (Landon Liboiron) invites them to play a game of truth or dare in the ruins of an old church. When they get back to school, the participants in the game start receiving Truth or Dare challenges through creepy psychic visions, and if they fail to either tell the truth or complete the dare, they gruesomely die.
I’ve seen far worse horror movies than Truth or Dare, also promoted under the title Blumhouse's Truth or Dare. Directed by Jason Wadlow, it’s slick and polished, with an attractive cast playing characters that aren’t as abrasive and obnoxious as they often are in movies like this. It helps that they seem to care about each other. Hale is particularly charming as the earnest good-girl heroine.
But it is, unmistakably, very derivative of other flicks of recent years like Final Destination and It Follows, and I found the ending bungled and unsatisfying. I appreciate the way Blumhouse Productions tries to give its young audience honest value on a modest scale, and this movie is not without merit. But it isn't anywhere near as good as Blumhouse's Get Out, or even as last fall's Happy Death Day.
Aardvark--Josh (Zachary Quinto) is a psychologically troubled guy, haunted by the powerful presence, and absence, of his older brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a famous TV actor. Craig pays Josh's bills, but isn't otherwise in touch with him, except through Josh's occasional apparent delusions, in which a homeless woman or a virile cop seem to him to be his brother, buried in a brilliant new characterization.
The real Craig does show up in the life of Josh's lonely therapist Emily (Jenny Slate), and unethically but perhaps understandably they start an affair. Meanwhile Josh meets an attractive young woman named Hannah (Sheila Vand), but is she another hallucination?
And so on. Aardvark is worth watching. It's perfectly well directed by Brian Shoaf, from his own script, which has perfectly speakable, intriguing, at times touching dialogue. The acting is top shelf. The tiny, exquisite Slate continues to show her range; her prim evasiveness is both funny and moving. Hamm is effortlessly convincing as this veteran celebrity, simultaneously sheepish and confident, quietly disappointed in his life. And Quinto brings dignity and humor to Josh, declining to milk the part for overt pathos.
But I sat there hoping, and doubting, that Shoaf would be able to snap Aardvark's ambiguities together into a dramatically coherent whole, and alas, he missed, at least for me. It was a near miss, maybe; the movie has a number of minor emotional payoffs, but they don't add up to a major emotional payoff.
In case you're wondering, I'm happy to report that the title isn't a cheat: There is an aardvark in Aardvark, played by a handsome creature billed as "Amani the Aardvark." The culmination of the aardvark's strand is, indeed, one of the movie's sweetest moments.
Check out my interview, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my pal, Arizona actress turned mystery novelist Cindy Brown, who signs her book The Phantom of the Oz at the Orpheum Theatre next Tuesday, April 17, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as a benefit for Friends of the Orpheum Theatre.
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