MOVIE REVIEW: DARE
Emmy Rossum and Zach Gilford are high school kids on the brink.
Most of us remember high school with a mix of laughter, fondness, and gut-crunching pain. You'll feel the same way after seeing Dare, the rich-kids-in-private-school flick created by Adam Salky.
Based on a messy but predictable love triangle, the movie follows Alexa (Emmy Rossum), a straight-A, type-A nerd whose perky posture gets slashed when her drama class gets invaded by a harsh actor (Alan Cumming). When he tells her to "fucking do something, fucking hate someone" if she wants to really succeed, Alexa bursts into tears, then takes action: In the next 15 minutes, she's changed her hair, her friends, and her sexual activity (as in, she actually starts having sex).
Her partner is the cute-ish, jock-ish Johnny (Zach Gilford) who's dealing with painful - but, again, predictable - family crap and a budding need for a boyfriend. When Johnny goes after Alexa's quietly gay BFF while he's still dating her... well, you can fill in the blanks.
The movie gets a lot of things right, including the painfully blunt dialogue that's rife in school cafeterias, and the notion that sometimes parents need drugs, parties, and problems more than their adolescent children.
It's also done a perfect job with casting: Zach Gilford gets to play a high school kid without a Southern accent, Rooney Mara is brave enough to play an insincere and unlikeable poser, Ashley Springer is fearless in his role as the best friend / boyfriend lynch pin, and we finally get to see Emmy Rossum in realistic, age-appropriate character (she's wonderful, by the way).
What you might not like? This feels like a movie that a middle-aged audience will find moving, exciting, and brave to the point of annoying rapture. But if you've been through tenth grade in the past ten years, you'll probably walk out of Dare saying, "Wow, those actors were great. But the story wasn't that dramatic. I mean, who cares if a rich kid with liberal, perfect parents is gay in high school? Please. Let me tell you about my friends..."
Maybe that's the next movie.
--FARAN KRENTCIL
This story was published on November 23, 2009.
