R, 1 hr. 30 min. Directed by: Adam Salky. Release Date: Nov 13, 2009. DVD Release Date: Feb 09, 2010.
****REPOSTED FROM THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH NEW EDITS/COMMENTS****
If Threesome had ever produced a sequel, it would have looked remarkably like this. Well, you have to allow for time's passing. You can truly be this scandalous in high school now. You totally don't have to do what I did, which was (sort of) wait for college and the lack of your mother's thumb. Don't believe me? Watch your local news for a few months. I still remember the football hazing episode on that whack job Bill O'Reilly wherein every new player on the varsity or maybe JV team had to use a marital aid of "significant size" on themselves in order to play on the team. I dunno, but every time I imagine that the farce played out a leetle like this:
I found the characters a bit engrossing, even though most of them were so shallow that I wouldn't have wanted to be near any of them in real life. The only cast member I really enjoyed was Alan Cummings, whose presence always seems to uplift a scene. It's a shame that he was only in about five minutes of film, but at least he totally knocks Emmy Rossum's character off her high horse.
The story was a bit more serious than your average teen flick, which I guess bring up mixed emotions. With a better cast, this might have been a stellar movie. I do; however, give mad props to Gilford and Springer for getting all the way through the pool scene without busting up into laughs or finding ways to relieve the tension. I don't know that I could have.
Dare suffers from a massive streak of what I think most teen movies suffer from, a complete and total break from the reality of high school politics. In NO bizzaroverse would Johnny Drake ever have gotten himself involved with either Ben or Alexa because, as Dion from Clueless put it, his stock would have plummeted. Alexa's a nightmarishly conflicted grade-junkie who decides to exercise her sexuality like it's a chemistry experiment and Ben, even not accounting for the secret he reveals later in the flick, was a freak and a half. No one in the "cool" kids would have been seen anywhere near them.
The other struggle I had here was that none of the interaction between Johnny, Ben, and Alexa felt natural. It didn't flow well, and this situation has flown better. Dare has a lot of the same themes as Threesome, but the actors in Threesome handled them much better, which is saying something.
One question. The evening after the pool scene. What the hell was that?
