User Reviews

I wouldn't call this a typical teen angst movie. It has some interesting twists and a surprising bit of innocence that you wouldn't guess from the trailers and descriptions.

Zach Gilford, Ashley Springer and Ana Gasteyer were the highlights of the film for me. (I'm not normally a fan of Ana's work, but I liked her in this.)

Warning, the rest is a potential Spoiler...

Alan Cumming's role is quite short, but his his character's words perhaps explain more about the actual story than anyone else's. If you watch the movie and find yourself scratching your head when the end credits roll, go back and watch his scenes. How is a great actor created? Do life lessons that just happen to you naturally because of who you are have a bigger impact on your life than ones you unnaturally try to force to occur? I think those questions play a big part in how the characters end up.

Overall I think it's a good movie, a bit more complicated than some, no easy answers or simple conclusion. If you're the kind of person who tries hard to present yourself as something that you're not, you may appreciate this movie more than others.

An almost insurmountable problem for me while viewing 'Dare' was, yet again, a filmmaker (and an Indie one to boot.) who cast actors too old to play high school teens. One would have gathered from the main and featured characters that they were in a movie about some college campus with a heavy population of post-graduate students. Hollywood has done this kind of casting since time immemorial. Don't the producers/directors realize that they're using a visual medium to tell the story? Not a radio show, not a play in a large theater but a movie, using close ups as well as medium and long shots. For a couple of the actors another dead give away is when they opened their mouths to speak. They sound like young adults, not 17 or 18 year old's. The movie, though revisiting an already well chewed story, is competently done, the performances are well directed and acted and director Adam Salky has done very well in this his first feature film. P.S.: I thought the major trauma that occurred to John near the end of his section could have been made clearer. Afterwards, I was never completely certain of what had happened to him prior to his deciding to become a serious student of acting at the very end of the movie.

This is a solid film I assumed was going to be a lame teen relationship flick but it turns into a somewhat clever unorthodox relationship flick that happens to utilize teens. Its broken into three parts where each part focuses on one of the three main characters. I liked that aspect of the film because it allowed us to get into the mind of each character pretty well and understand their turmoils and motivations. But the problem is once you're done with one character that character then becomes less deep which rubbed me the wrong way. You have a window into the emotional turmoil going on in Alexa that would allow her to use Johnny the way she does only to have her character fade to a somewhat two dimensional "girlfriend" character which basically acts as a foil to Johnny in his (and the last) bit. Ben fairs even worse I think going from the apparent nerd best friend of Alexa who we assume is secretly longing for her only to be thrown a twist (which was well done in my opinion) that he has actually been longing for Johnny not Alexa. But then once his chapter is done he becomes this terrible aggressive horn dog who only wants to get in Johnnys pants and he loses all the emotional turbulence and likability he had developed during Alexa's and his chapters. Yuck. What a way to ruin a character...

I definitely enjoyed the bagel/banana scene but was unsure what we were supposed to think of Bens mom. Was she fancying Johnny? Was she just there to deliver a metaphor? You think its going somewhere then nothing comes of it. Also didn't like Courtney's character. She seemed a decent enough foil for Alexa at first but she devolves into this weird sad lush at the end whose sole purpose is to host the party where everything falls apart. And what was with that party anyway? Were they purposefully doing things to mess with Johnnys head? Why? Although both characters (Alexa and Ben) come off as selfish in their motives I didn't see them as nefarious or sinister or purposefully wanting to hurt him. Yet that whole scene had the feel of a purposefully planned torture session for Johnny. And we cant totally feel sorry for Johnny either. He gets used but his motivation is ultimately selfish as well. He wants a connection so desperately that he's willing to believe an impossible three headed relationship could actually work out for everyone and is devastated when it becomes clear that no... it cant...

All in all its worth watching despite some plot holes and inconsistencies. I wish they could have figured out a way to keep the characters developed after their chapters were done but thats probably a real trick, understandably so.

Let's get a couple of things straight. This movie is rated R for sexual content but Emmy Rossum does not get naked in it. If that's what you're looking for, trust me, you won't find it here. What you will find is one of the reasons movie critics get so cranky. When you see a critic who appears overly harsh about a film's flaws, it could be because he or she has seen those same flaws in so many other movies. That's what happens with Dare. It does something I've seen in at least 2 or 3 other films and not only does it never work, I don't think it can work and don't understand why anyone ever thinks it would.

What Dare does is completely shift its focus from one character to another as it goes along. I'm not talking about focusing on many different people whose stories intersect or even telling the same story over again with different perspectives. I'm talking about one continuous story where the main character simply changes as you watch, oftentimes with a little notice on screen to indicate the change.

Where this storytelling device comes from is a mystery to me. What I am clear on is that it's defective, at least in the context of a motion picture. Whatever the theory or intent, the practical effect of doing this in a film is to ask the audience to do the same thing over and over again. At the start of the movie, the viewer is introduced to a character and asked to take an interest in their life. Then that character is either ejected or relegated to the background and the viewer is introduced to another character and asked to take an interest in their life. And that's repeated again and sometimes again and again and again.

The problem with this should be obvious. If the audience actually takes interest in the first character you show them, that's who they want to watch. They don't want that person to be replaced by some other character, either one they haven't seen before or one they have but has been established as a minor character in their minds. The first 10 or 15 minutes of a motion picture is usually when people figure out if they want to watch it or not. Rotating the main character is asking people to go through that introductory process over and over and that's not a natural thing.

Dare rotates through three main characters. Alexa (Emmy Rossum) is a virginal theater chick in her high school. Her story is about how she's emotionally repressed and inexperienced and how being taunted about that by a well known alumnus of her school transforms her into a slut. Next up to bat is Alexa's best friend Ben (Ashley Springer). His story is about how he's gay and…well, that's pretty much it. The commonality of the first two segments is that Alexa and Ben both have their first sexual encounter with the same guy. He's Johnny (Zach Gilford) and he takes over as the main character in the third and thankfully final part of the movie. After being shown as the cool but still somewhat dickish most popular kid in school, Johnny's segment is about how he's really even more screwed up than either Alexa and Ben because…blah, blah blah. Alexa's story is the only one I cared about and it gets shoved off screen just as they start to show the fallout of her making a radical change in her life, replacing it with the utterly-by-the-numbers tales of Ben and Johnny.

Well, utterly-by-the-numbers isn't accurate. Ben has sex with Johnny after he knows Alexa and Johnny have boinked and Johnny knows Alexa and Ben are best friends when he and Ben do it. I know kids today are supposed to be more sexually fluid, but that's pretty twisted and Dare loses its last chance to engage the audience by having Ben be totally unconcerned by such bed hopping, Johnny treating it like having to choose between chocolate and vanilla ice cream and Alexa acting as though the cross-copulating is like eating your salad with the wrong fork.

By the time Dare wraps up, it's clear that Alexa was ultimately a supporting character to Johnny's story and Ben was barely more than a bit part, even though the ending to Johnny's story happens entirely off camera. That's the kind of nonsensical structure you get from rotating main characters. It doesn't work and filmmakers need to stop doing it.

The acting and the direction of Dare are fine and the dialog is unmemorable, but none of that matters because it's so poorly structured. If this film were a house, it would be condemned and the only ones who could live in it would be families of raccoons. I could have overlooked that if Emmy Rossum had gotten naked. She doesn't, so I can't.

One of the worst films I have ever seen in my life. Emmy Rossum is trying to prove to everyone that she isn't just the girl next door, she is the slutty girl next door on crack.

I'm confused, are we supposed to feel sorry for these rich kids who don't know what to do with their lives but to booze, drug up, have all kinds of unprotected sex and still make it into high society, corporate America and become future bureaucrats like their parents? Uh, to quote an "f" bomb like one of the ones used in the film. "I don't effing think so."

This film deserves an "F" as in "F***". Avoid this movie like a plague. You have been warned.

I had moderately high hopes for this movie but I found it mostly dull and tedious. It is about a group of high school students in drama class, but with much more drama outside school hours.

I was anxious to see Emmy Rossum who was so appropriate as Christine in "Phantom of the Opera". Here she is Alexa Walker, serious about her acting aspirations but doesn't much positive feedback.

One of her friends is a guy, Ashley Springer as Ben Berger. Ben is a social outcast and is really confused. In one conversation he admits he is about to finish high school and has never kissed anyone. But that conversation was in the swimming pool with another guy, and they fill that void in Ben's life.

That guy is Zach Gilford as loner Johnny Drake, who also becomes attracted to Alexa. He declares "I am not gay" but near the end he, Alexa, and Ben get passionate as a threesome. Everyone becomes confused by that situation.

About the best I can say about this movie is that it is 'interesting' but I could not recommend it.