Double Trouble #6: Truth or Dare VS Rampage
Welcome everyone to the sixth Double Trouble segment here at You Can’t Unwatch It. This past weekend I saw both Truth or Dare and Rampage and both of them were terrible. I suppose you could stop reading now and just take my word for it or you can read on…
Truth or Dare
A group of friends go on spring break in Mexico and are lured to an abandoned church by a stranger to play a game of Truth or Dare. The friends discover that the stranger passed on a kind of curse to them where they will constantly have to play the game with a devil calling all the shots. They must play until they die. If they don’t tell the truth or fail to complete a dare, they die. Now the audience must follow this group of cookie cutter college students as they try to lift the curse while playing their own game of guessing which character is going to get it next because they would be hard pressed to care for any of them. If there was any real investment in any of the characters to be had that would create tension, suspense and other things that good horror movies need but alas that all MIA in this latest release from Bloomhouse.
Wow. I could just end the review here and just call it a day. No? You want me to elaborate further? OK. I like a challenge.
The characters in the movie are typical ones you have seen in other horror films before. You have the responsible girl of the group who has big plans for her future and thinks of others’ welfare (she is played by Lucy Hale and she is the only cast member I recognize.), the best friend who cheats on her boyfriend, the best friend in the group who doesn’t believe what is happening at all, the horny jerk, and others. Apart from a few tiny surprises here and there, the characters behave exactly as you think they would and more often than not you already know who is going to die when it is their time to do a dare. Apart from Lucy Hale and the actress who plays her best friend none of the performances were really that impressive. That’s not to say that the aforementioned two actress gave great award worthy performances but compared to everyone else they might as well be.
Despite looking reasonably well made it still manages to feel cheap because the premise is absolutely stupid not to mention incredibly convoluted. I actually stopped paying attention to the plot when the characters began investigating how the curse came about and how they break it. I’ll be honest. I went into this one hoping that this movie would be another Wish Upon as that one had a premise that involved dumb youngsters and lots of people getting killed through paranormal means but whereas Wish Upon was unintentionally laugh out loud funny, Truth or Dare has no unintentional comedic value. Sure, the stupid Jim Carrey rubber face grin that characters make when they are possessed by the certain devil running the game got a chuckle here and there out of me but not much else. There isn’t even any over-the-top improbable character deaths that you would see in the aforementioned Wish Upon or even Final Destination 3. The movie also feels longer than it actually is. It just keeps going and going and it actually became a chore to stay seated till the end.
The only genuine surprise I got at the end of this one was some people in the audience of the screening I attended saying “Are you kidding me?” by the time credits started rolling. I can’t say I blame them for having that reaction. It was as if the movie gave us the middle finger at the end which causes me and I’m certain others in the audience to hate certain characters than one would have thought possible at the beginning. But at the end of the day the joke is really on us. We did pay to see it after all. Hollywood already made a horror movie from that Ouija board thing so it doesn’t surprise me that they would move on to party games. What’s next? Bloomhouse’s Duck, Duck Goose?
Actually, I better not give them any ideas.
Rampage
Dwayne Johnson stars as Davis Okoye, an ex special forces jack of all trades (at least that’s how the movie seems to present him), who now works in a special animal sanctuary in California where he looks after an albino gorilla named George. When George, as well as a wolf named Ralph and an Alligator/Crocodile named Lizzy (it’s actually unnamed in the movie but that is what it is called in the game), get exposed to a gas designed to alter the genetic makeup of animals, the become really enormous and start to run amok. When they are drawn to Chicago, they start to go on a (title drop incoming!)RAMPAGE! Now it is up to Davis, Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) and Agent Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to stop the monstrous trio from destroying Chicago.
While this one isn’t quite as bad and didn’t make me quite as angry as Truth or Dare, this one was still really darn bad. Here’s the thing.I played the Rampage games as a kid. More specifically, I played Rampage World Tour on the Nintendo 64 and I fondly remembering playing that game with my brothers. The game was fun because it really has no plot. You play as one of the three monsters and you destroy buildings, eat humans like chicken nuggets, take down military vehicles and grab items to get a high score. That’s it. It’s not impossible to make an entertaining movie involving cartoonish monsters destroying humans but it’s just that the Dwayne Johnson film went about it by making it deadly serious for the most part and the end result is just dull.
First off, the story is about as generic as you can get for a movie that involves monsters. You have an evil corporation that developed the gene altering gas that cause the three monsters to be what they are. The evil corporation is working to contain the situation by luring the monsters to Chicago with a sound that annoys the monsters to the point where they are willing to go to the source to stop it. I suppose they then intend to inject them with a serum to control their rage and… make a profit off of it? I don’t really know. Of course, the military gets involved and want do nuke the monsters and it is up to our main characters to resolve the situation before half of Chicago gets nuked. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Secondly, all the characters, apart from Jeffrey Dean Morgan, are boring. Dwayne Johnson is the tough guy with a vast military history and is the only one who can get through to George. The only slightly interesting thing to his character is that he likes animals more than people and we find out why later in the film but we don’t really see him with other animals and such. So when he is a jerk to humans throughout the film, that’s all he really comes off as. A jerk.
Naomie Harris is a fine actress but she is just wasted here as a genetic engineer who was formerly employed by the evil corporation and has a tragic past. You also have Malin Akerman as the head of the evil corporation (no, I don’t know its name and I never cared to remember) and her stupid lackey brother who are evil I guess… As I stated above Jeffrey Dean Morgan is actually pretty cool in this movie as a kind of cowboy behaving secret agent. Even though he doesn’t do a whole lot in the movie and clearly wasn’t trying all that much, he effortlessly acts everyone else off the screen. He clearly wasn’t taking it seriously when everyone else was and I actually missed him when he wasn’t on screen.
Lastly, despite all the action, monster fights and state of the art special effects, this is a bland looking film. Much like director Brad Peyton’s previous feature, San Andreas (2015), Rampage has a lot of large expensive sequences happening on the screen but none of them are executed with any real style and just comes off as another Roland Emmerich type of big budget, cities get destroyed, big things go boom movie. The story is blah, the characters are blah, the effects are reasonably good but directed in a blah fashion but at least the monsters look awesome right? Wrong! They went with the decision to make the monsters look realistic. Apart from George to an extent, the monsters don’t look all that cool.
The monsters as they were portrayed in the video game looked like they had more personality and I would have much rather have seen them portrayed that way. “But Daniel!” I hear you say. “The game designs would never have worked because the world in the movie is being portrayed as somewhat realistic.” Yes, and that is the biggest problem I have with the movie. For a movie based on a game where you destroy buildings, eat humans and fight the military, who asked for a somewhat realistic movie out of this? This reminds me of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (2009) where it was based on a silly anime style fighting game and they decided to make a gritty realistic take on it. Don’t get me wrong, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li is far, far worse than Rampage. What I am saying is going away from the fun, bright, colorful feel of the source material is not always a wise move. Rampage could have been an animated comedy done in stop motion. With good writing and inspired direction, it could have worked. The Lego Movie (2014) proves that it can be possible.
So yeah. Both of these movies blew. I don’t recommend either one of them. Instead, go see Isle of Dogs as that one was wonderful. Or you can just save your money and wait for Avengers Infinity War. I’m sure even I will have much more fun with that one and I’m not even the biggest fan of the MCU.
