Let's start from the assumption that you should care about the teens in "Blumhouse's Truth or Dare" if you want to enjoy the spectacle of watching them play a potentially life-threatening slumber group activity. There are, admittedly, a handful of scenes that serve to up-end our canned expectations of who these twenty-somethings are, and what their pre-graduation lives are like. But many of these assumptions are based on superficial generalities, ones that would be better applied to a fluffier teen sex comedy set in high school. Several stock types vie for our attention. Our heroine is, of course, reserved Olivia (Lucy Hale), a moral-minded, smarter-than-average blank slate who gets roped into one last pre-college spring break by her flirty best friend Markie (Violett Beane). Markie brings along a number of their mutual best friends, including Ronnie (Sam Lerner), a leering but harmless horndog, and Brad (Hayden Szeto), a mostly indistinct supporting character whose most salient trait is that he's openly gay.
Brad and Ronnie are the most revealingly under-developed meat puppets in the film. Their peers are also treated like human-shaped props, since they also primarily serve to hold up the film whenever an expository line must be said or a co-lead's assumptions challenged. The sketch-thin nature of these characters isn't as offensive or bothersome: hot guy Lucas (Tyler Posey) is a prize for Olivia and Markie to fight over—though he does have a cute one-liner that suggests otherwise—and dickish law student Tyson (Nolan Gerard Funk) has all of the bite, and in-your-face attitude of a garden variety jock, a quality that's mildly amusing given his chosen area of study.
But Ronnie is a one-note joke who screams "no homo" before he is teased with the possibility of giving another guy a lap dance. As with Lucas, Ronnie has a moment where he suggests that he's capable of growing out of his adolescent need to hit on any woman in sight. But isn't college—or, at least, the version of college we often seen in movies—the place where young adults are supposed to learn who they are (or maybe who they want to be)? Why then is this soon-to-be-college grad neither villainous, nor good enough to warrant more than just a second of reflection? Shouldn't he—or, more accurately, Wadlow and his fellow co-creators—know what he is either going or trying to become?
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