Love Me if you Dare review

 Number 535 on the top 1000 films of all time is the French romantic-comedy Jeux D'enfants or Love me if you Dare.

Eight year old Julien Janvier's (Thibault Verhaeghe) mother is dying of cancer. He finds solace in his neighbour Sophie Kawalsky (Josephine Lebas-Joly) a girl bullied because of her Polish heritage. The two of them fall in love over a series of dares they ask each other to do. These dares continue into adulthood and threaten to rip their lives apart. Guillame Canet plays the adult Julien and Marion Cotillard the adult Sophie.

This film had the artistic style of a Wes Anderson film a la Moonrise Kingdom but it had none of the heart. It had a unique colour palate and quirky cinematography but really annoying characters.

I didn'[t like either Julien or Sophie, either apart or together. As this is a rom-com, I'm expected to root for the two to get together, but I found no reason to do this. This was down to the central story of them playing childish pranks on each other. These start out as harmless, but turn into cruel especially when they affect innocent bystanders.

One prank sees them bully a classmate, another sees the destruction of Julien's wedding and humiliation of his would-be bride. It was reminiscent of Youtube pranksters causing trouble and then going "it's just a prank bro."

I also didn't understand what was keeping Julien and Sophie apart. Why couldn't they be together? They both liked each other - the actors had both on and off-screen chemistry evidenced by how they later went onto have a long-term relationship. Julien's dad never liked Sophie and thinks she is a bad influence on his son, yet he doesn't do much to stop them from being together.

Finally, can we talk about that ending? Spoilers

As the ultimate dare to prove their love to each other, Julien and Sophie voluntarily decide to be encased together in a block of concrete. Yes, you read that correctly. They chose to be buried alive in concrete. How was this romantic? This is something you would see in a horror movie. Not a romance.

I really didn't like Love me if you Dare. Tonally it was all wrong. And it was all style over substance.