An ego-shattering dressing down sets good girl Alexa (Emmy Rossum) to a do-it-yourself refurbishing that has repercussions for her loner pal Ben (Ashley Springer) and bad boy Johnny (Zach Gilford). Alan Cumming has a brief but memorable role as the sharp-tongued acting coach who tells Alexa, a prim high school senior in a posh Philadelphia suburb, that she can’t be great without having taken any risks in life. Her initial steps at doing so are somewhat comical and involve changing clothes, but that gives way to taking them off along with Johnny, who hadn’t previously noticed her. Ben gets jealous, though not in the way you might think. While Ben and Alexa are sexually inexperienced, Johnny is more emotionally inexperienced, and Dare is about these characters prodding each other into sexual and emotional entanglements for which they haven’t prepared. They surprised me too, so I won’t give much away.
Dare, expanded from a 2005 short, provocatively explores its themes, but is somewhat forced in its plotting. The events, particularly jock Johnny's transformation into sensitive new age guy, would be more believable if they weren’t compressed into an extremely short time span. Dare is a promising, lively first feature for its writer, David Brind, and director, Adam Salky, but would have been better if its dramatic conflict seemed to spring organically from the plot rather than the latter having, seemingly, been created to fit the former.
IMDB link
viewed 10/17/09 at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival screening) and reviewed 12/4/09
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