Nerve makes a good idea mediocre
NERVE ★★ 1/2 out of 5 Starring: Emma Roberts, Dave Franco, Emily Meade Director: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman Duration: 96 minutes
Mash up Snapchat, Pokémon Go, MTV’s Fear and David Fincher’s The Game, and you get Nerve: an ultracool, media-savvy, hyperneon teenage drama/dystopian techno thriller. Originally concocted by young-adult fiction author Jeanne Ryan, Nerve was brought to the screen by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the guys who gave us Catfish and two of the Paranormal Activity films.
Despite its numerous shortcomings, Nerve’s premise is fairly promising. High school senior Venus (Emma Roberts), or Vee for short, is considered a wallflower by her friends, but when her best friend Sydney (Emily Meade), claims she’s a wuss, Vee compulsively joins Nerve, an online game in which players complete dares given to them by watchers.
Her uncharacteristic choice to “play” the game leads her into a wild, dopamine rush of an adventure, accompanied by one of Nerve’s most popular players, Ian (Dave Franco). Her dares grow in magnitude, from kissing a stranger, to helping a blindfolded Ian drive a motorcycle, to walking across a high-up ladder straddling two windows in adjacent buildings.
As players complete dares, they receive cash bonuses in addition to likes, favourites and lots and lots of attention. The film is perfectly calibrated to presentday Internet culture, from the glitchy cellphone-video quality of certain scenes to the troll-like insults Vee gets via comments.
Nerve represents our attention-hungry Internet social stratosphere, and like most contemporary YA drama, the game is clearly a representation of high school and its never-ending popularity contest. Sydney becomes extremely envious of Vee’s overnight success in Nerve, resulting in a petty cat fight between the friends, which grows increasingly darker, until they realize they’re trapped in a game that’s taken over their lives. Right.
This is when the allegory to reallife Internet phenomenon or anything remotely resembling social commentary dries up, and Nerve goes from being nerve-racking to simply getting on your nerves.
As Vee enters the darker side of the game, where she and other contestants, Ian and a punk kid named Ty (rapper Machine Gun Kelly), must reckon with their Internet celebrity by playing a game of gladiator, her friends try to save them.
Enter the dark web world of hacking, a convenient little deus ex machina that can solve just about anything with the press of a few fast buttons. Vee’s best friend Tommy (Miles Heizer), whose character is little more than a jealous third wheel, suddenly turns into Mr. Robot and obtains the help of a white-hat hacking collective to stop the game.
The final act turns Nerve from crime thriller/teen drama into a banal morality play, including. a scene in which Vee screams at the spectators, “Do you want us to kill each other?” But the irony is that by getting hackers to stop the game, it must explain in technical detail how it works, which makes the game sound nonsensical.
Thanks to films like Jason Reitman’s Men, Women, and Children, the Internet-as-evil critique sub-genre is already pretty dire, and Nerve loses itself when it tries too hard to fit in, instead of embracing its inner dumb jock.